ct in
many aspects.

_As_ absolute, then, or _sub specie eternitatis_, or _quatenus
infinitus est_, the world repels our sympathy because it has no
history. _As such_, the absolute neither acts nor suffers, nor loves
nor hates; it has no needs, desires, or aspirations, no failures or
successes, friends or enemies, victories or defeats. All such things
pertain to the world qua relative, in which our finite experiences
lie, and whose vicissitudes alone have power to arouse our interest.
What boots it to tell me that the absolute way is the true way, and
to exhort me, as Emerson says, to lift mine eye up to its style, and
manners of the sky, if the feat is impossible by definition? I am
finite once for all, and all the categories of my sympathy are knit up
with the finite world _as such_, and with things that have a history.
'Aus dieser erde quellen meine freuden, und ihre sonne scheinet meinen
leiden.' I have neither eyes nor ears nor heart nor mind for anything
of an opposite description, and the stagnant felicity of the
absolute's own perfection moves me as little as I move it. If we were
_readers_ only of the cosmic novel, things would be different: we
should then share the author's point of view and recognize villains to
be as essential as heroes in the plot. But we are not the readers but
the very personages of the world-drama. In your own eyes each of you
here is its hero, and the villains are your respective friends or
enemies. The tale which the absolute reader finds so perfect, we spoil
for one another through our several vital identifications with the
destinies of the particular personages involved.

The doctrine on which the absolutists lay most stress is the
absolute's 'timeless' character. For pluralists, on the other hand,
time remains as real as anything, and nothing in the universe is great
or static or eternal enough not to have some history. But the world
that each of us feels most intimately at home with is that of beings
with histories that play into our history, whom we can help in their
vicissitudes even as they help us in ours. This satisfaction the
absolute denies us; we can neither help nor hinder it, for it stands
outside of history. It surely is a merit in a philosophy to make the
very life we lead seem real and earnest. Pluralism, in exorcising the
absolute, exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life we are
at home in, and thus redeems the nature of reality from essential
foreignness.