eems to me clearly
polytheistic; but the word 'polytheism' usually gives offence, so
perhaps it is better not to use it. Only one thing is certain, and
that is the result of our criticism of the absolute: the only way
to escape from the paradoxes and perplexities that a consistently
thought-out monistic universe suffers from as from a species of
auto-intoxication--the mystery of the 'fall' namely, of reality
lapsing into appearance, truth into error, perfection into
imperfection; of evil, in short; the mystery of universal determinism,
of the block-universe eternal and without a history, etc.;--the only
way of escape, I say, from all this is to be frankly pluralistic and
assume that the superhuman consciousness, however vast it may be, has
itself an external environment, and consequently is finite. Present
day monism carefully repudiates complicity with spinozistic monism. In
that, it explains, the many get dissolved in the one and lost, whereas
in the improved idealistic form they get preserved in all their
manyness as the one's eternal object. The absolute itself is thus
represented by absolutists as having a pluralistic object. But if even
the absolute has to have a pluralistic vision, why should we ourselves
hesitate to be pluralists on our own sole account? Why should we
envelop our many with the 'one' that brings so much poison in its
train?

The line of least resistance, then, as it seems to me, both in
theology and in philosophy, is to accept, along with the superhuman
consciousness, the notion that it is not all-embracing, the notion,
in other words, that there is a God, but that he is finite, either in
power or in knowledge, or in both at once. These, I need hardly tell
you, are the terms in which common men have usually carried on their
active commerce with God; and the monistic perfections that make the
notion of him so paradoxical practically and morally are the colder
addition of remote professorial minds operating _in distans_ upon
conceptual substitutes for him alone.

Why cannot 'experience' and 'reason' meet on this common ground? Why
cannot they compromise? May not the godlessness usually but needlessly
associated with the philosophy of immediate experience give way to a
theism now seen to follow directly from that experience more widely
taken? and may not rationalism, satisfied with seeing her _a priori_
proofs of God so effectively replaced by empirical evidence, abate
something of her absolutist