t is held that goodness must not lose its
meaning, even if it be necessary that its claims upon the cosmos should
be somewhat abated.

_Metaphysical idealism_ is the extreme form of the optimistic bias. It
provides a moral individual with a sense of proprietorship in the
universe; it justifies him in the belief that the moral victory has been
won from all eternity. Goodness is held to be the very essence and
condition of being.

Let me briefly state the inherent difficulty in this philosophy of
religion. Being is judged to be identical with good. But the world of
experience is not good; it must therefore be condemned as unreal. Of
what, then, do goodness and being consist? If an empty formalism is
{243} to be avoided, the all-good-and-all-real must be restored to the
world of experience. But as the all-real it can not consistently be
identified with only a part of that world; and if it be identified with
the whole, its all-goodness contradicts the moral distinction within the
world of experience, between good and evil. The theory is now confronted
with the opposite danger, that of materialism, or moral promiscuousness.
Let me illustrate this full swing of the pendulum from formalism to
materialism by briefly summarizing certain well-known types of religious
philosophy.

At the formalistic extreme stands the Buddhistic _pessimism_,[12]
which rests on a recognition of the inevitable taint of this world,
of the implication of evil in life. To avoid this taint, the
all-real-and-all-good must be freed even from existence. It can be
conceived and attained only by denial. Nirvana is at once the all-real,
the all-good, and--in terms of the existent world--nothing.

_Other-worldliness_ is the Christian modification of the Oriental
philosophy of illusion. Heaven is a world beyond, to be exchanged for
this. It is not constituted by the denial of this world, as is Nirvana,
but access to it is conditioned by such denial. It is goodness and
happiness hypostasized, and offered as compensation for martyrdom. But
since every natural impulse and source {244} of satisfaction must be
repudiated, it remains a purely formal conception, except in so far as
the worldly imagination unlawfully prefigures it. Rigorously construed,
it consists only in obedience, a willing of God's will, whatever that may
be.

_Mysticism_,[13] which appears as a motive in all religions of this type,
defines the all-real-and-all-good in terms o