e New Absolutism.]

Sect. 173. Even Plato had been conscious of a certain responsibility for
matters of fact. Inasmuch as he attached the predicate of reality to the
absolute perfection, he made that being the only source to which they
could be referred. Perhaps, then, he suggests, they are due to the very
bounteousness of God.

"He was good, and no goodness can ever have any jealousy of
anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all
things should be as like himself as possible."[352:2]

Plotinus, in whom Platonism is leavened by the spirit of an age which
is convinced of sin, and which is therefore more keenly aware of the
positive existence of the imperfect, follows out this suggestion.
Creation is "emanation"--the overflow of God's excess of goodness. But
one does not readily understand how goodness, desiring all things to be
like itself, should thereupon create evil--even to make it good. The
Aristotelian philosophy, with its conception of the gradation of
substances, would seem to be better equipped to meet the difficulty. A
development requires stages; and every finite thing may thus be perfect
in its way and perfect in its place, while in the absolute truth or God
there is realized the meaning of the whole order. But if so, there is
evidently something that escapes God, to wit, the meaningless and
unfitness, the error and evil, of the stages in their successive
isolation. Nor is it of any avail to insist (as did Plato, Aristotle,
and Spinoza alike) that these are only privation, and therefore not to
be counted in the sum of reality. For privation is itself an experience,
with a great variety of implications, moral and psychological; and these
cannot be attributed to God or deduced from him, in consideration of his
absolute perfection.

The task of the new absolutism is now in clear view. The perfect must
be amended to admit the imperfect. The absolute significance must be so
construed as to provide for the evident facts; for the unmeaning things
and changes of the natural order; for ignorance, sin, despair, and every
human deficiency. The new philosophy is to solve this problem by
defining a _spiritual absolute_, and by so construing the life or
dynamics of spirit, as to demonstrate the necessity of the very
imperfection and opposition which is so baffling to the realist.

[Sidenote: The Beginning of Absolute Idealism in Kant's Analysis of
Experience.]

Sect. 174. Absolute ideal