ell with the cosmos--central peace abiding at the heart of endless
agitation. This conception is rational in many ways, beautiful
aesthetically, beautiful intellectually (could we only follow it into
detail), and beautiful morally, if the enjoyment of security can be
accounted moral. Practically it is less beautiful; for, as we saw in
our last lecture, in representing the deepest reality of the world as
static and without a history, it loosens the world's hold upon our
sympathies and leaves the soul of it foreign. Nevertheless it does
give _peace_, and that kind of rationality is so paramountly demanded
by men that to the end of time there will be absolutists, men who
choose belief in a static eternal, rather than admit that the finite
world of change and striving, even with a God as one of the strivers,
is itself eternal. For such minds Professor Royce's words will always
be the truest: 'The very presence of ill in the temporal order is the
condition of the perfection of the eternal order.... We long for the
absolute only in so far as in us the absolute also longs, and seeks
through our very temporal striving, the peace that is nowhere in time,
but only, and yet absolutely, in eternity. Were there no longing in
time there would be no peace in eternity.... God [_i.e._ the absolute]
who here in me aims at what I now temporally miss, not only possesses
in the eternal world the goal after which I strive, but comes to
possess it even through and because of my sorrow. Through this my
tribulation the absolute triumph then is won.... In the absolute I am
fulfilled. Yet my very fulfilment demands and therefore can transcend
this sorrow.'[7] Royce is particularly felicitous in his ability to
cite parts of finite experience to which he finds his picture of this
absolute experience analogous. But it is hard to portray the absolute
at all without rising into what might be called the 'inspired' style
of language--I use the word not ironically, but prosaically and
descriptively, to designate the only literary form that goes with the
kind of emotion that the absolute arouses. One can follow the pathway
of reasoning soberly enough,[8] but the picture itself has to be
effulgent. This admirable faculty of transcending, whilst inwardly
preserving, every contrariety, is the absolute's characteristic form
of rationality. We are but syllables in the mouth of the Lord; if the
whole sentence is divine, each syllable is absolutely what it should