to moral interests because
by attributing spiritual perfection to the totality of being it
discredits all moral loyalties and antagonisms. The difficulties that
lie in the way of absolute idealism are due, then, to the complexity of
its synthesis, to its complementary recognition of differences and
resolution of them into unity. But this synthesis is due to the urgency
of certain great problems which the first or realistic expression of
the absolutist motive left undiscovered and unsolved.

[Sidenote: The Great Outstanding Problems of Absolutism.]

Sect. 172. It is natural to approach so deliberate and calculating a
philosophy from the stand-point of the problems which it proposes to
solve. One of these is the epistemological problem of the relation
between the state of knowledge and its object. Naturalism and absolute
realism side with common-sense in its assumption that although the real
object is essential to the valid state of knowledge, its being known is
not essential to the real object. Subjectivism, on the other hand,
maintains that being is essentially the content of a knowing state, or
an activity of the knower himself. Absolute idealism proposes to accept
the general epistemological principle of subjectivism; but to satisfy
the realistic demand for a standard, compelling object, by setting up an
_absolute knower_, with whom all valid knowledge must be in agreement.
This epistemological statement of absolute idealism is its most mature
phase; and the culminating phase, in which it shows unmistakable signs
of passing over into another doctrine. We must look for its pristine
inspiration in its solution of another fundamental problem: that of the
relation between the absolute and the empirical. Like absolute realism,
this philosophy regards the universe as a unitary and internally
necessary being, and undertakes to hold that being accountable for every
item of experience. But we have found that absolute realism is beset
with the difficulty of thus accounting for the fragmentariness and
isolation of the individual. The contention that the universe must
really be a rational or perfect unity is disputed by the evident
multiplicity, irrelevance, and imperfection in the foreground of
experience. The inference to perfection and the confession of
imperfection seem equally unavoidable. Rational necessities and
empirical facts are out of joint.

[Sidenote: The Greek Philosophers and the Problem of Evil. The Task of
th