I 



WHY THE ABSOLUTE CANNOT BE IN PROCESS. 2>33 



by nearly all who attempt these ultimate questions 

 at all, as the deepest truth about the nature of 

 things ! It is perhaps fortunate that the obscurity 

 of their language conceals this final void from the 

 generality of men, but it exists in all philosophies 

 which make an infinite God their first principle.^ 



§ 12. Pantheism, then, destroys the reality of the 

 world-process. But we may go further and say that 

 it is for similar reasons equally incompatible with all 

 Change or Becoming. This is not, it is true, a 



^ It is sufficient to show this in one case, for excjnplo ab uno 

 disce o?fines, and we shall choose for that purpose one who is as 

 certainly the frankest and clearest as he is the ablest of modern 

 metaphysicians. E. von Hartmann is strongly and sincerely con- 

 vinced that the world is a process, and that, too, a process of 

 redemption. A redemption of what ? Of the Absolute ! For 

 the Absolute is now no longer absolute, but a mere ci-devant 

 Absolute, and requires to be redeemed from the deplorable con- 

 sequences of a youthful faux pas. It created the world, or en- 

 tered upon the world-process, in a fit of temporary insanity. Or, 

 as von Hartmann puts it more politely, when the absolute Uncon- 

 scious is quiescent, its Reason is non-existent, and its Will is 

 potential. Only, unfortunately, the Will is not in this condition 

 guided by Reason, and so the Unconscious commits an irrational 

 act of willing, and becomes actual. But by the nature of things 

 (superior to the Absolute-Unconscious ?), to will is to be miser- 

 able, and the Unconscious is supremely miserable. So it stirs up 

 its Reason, and the Reason devises the world-process as a sort of 

 homoeopathic cure of the misery of the Absolute, the end of which 

 is to bring the Unconscious back into the quiescence from which 

 it so rashly and irrationally departed. It is interesting to note in 

 this, (i) the frank admission that the ultimate cause of the world's 

 existence is the irrational, in this case an irrational act of Will ; 

 (2) that even when this has been assumed, it must be supposed 

 also that for practical purposes of explaining the world, the Infinite 

 has ceased to be infinite. Not even when we have been told that 

 the ultimate reason of things is something for which no reason can 

 be given, can anything be made of the world except on the sup- 

 position that somehow this irrational Absolute has ceased to be 

 infinite. 



