continuity taking its place. Finally, since this broken state of
things is intolerable, the absolute _deus ex machina_ is called on to
mend it in his own way, since we cannot mend it in ours.

Any other picture than this of post-kantian absolutism I am unable
to frame. I see the intellectualistic criticism destroying the
immediately given coherence of the phenomenal world, but unable to
make its own conceptual substitutes cohere, and I see the resort to
the absolute for a coherence of a higher type. The situation has
dramatic liveliness, but it is inwardly incoherent throughout, and the
question inevitably comes up whether a mistake may not somewhere have
crept in in the process that has brought it about. May not the remedy
lie rather in revising the intellectualist criticism than in first
adopting it and then trying to undo its consequences by an arbitrary
act of faith in an unintelligible agent. May not the flux of sensible
experience itself contain a rationality that has been overlooked,
so that the real remedy would consist in harking back to it more
intelligently, and not in advancing in the opposite direction away
from it and even away beyond the intellectualist criticism that
disintegrates it, to the pseudo-rationality of the supposed absolute
point of view. I myself believe that this is the real way to keep
rationality in the world, and that the traditional rationalism has
always been facing in the wrong direction. I hope in the end to make
you share, or at any rate respect, this belief, but there is much to
talk of before we get to that point.

I employed the word 'violent' just now in describing the dramatic
situation in which it pleases the philosophy of the absolute to make
its camp. I don't see how any one can help being struck in absolutist
writings by that curious tendency to fly to violent extremes of which
I have already said a word. The universe must be rational; well
and good; but _how_ rational? in what sense of that eulogistic but
ambiguous word?--this would seem to be the next point to bring up.
There are surely degrees in rationality that might be discriminated
and described. Things can be consistent or coherent in very diverse
ways. But no more in its conception of rationality than in its
conception of relations can the monistic mind suffer the notion of
more or less. Rationality is one and indivisible: if not rational
thus indivisibly, the universe must be completely irrational, and no
shadin