in their specific and proper natures, without the compromise which
is involved in all attempts to extend some one until it shall embrace
them all. If such a universe seems inconceivably desultory and chaotic,
one may always remind one's self by directly consulting experience that
it is not only found immediately and unreflectively, but returned to and
lived in after every theoretical excursion.

[Sidenote: Moral Implications of such a Pluralistic Philosophy. Purity
of the Good.]

Sect. 214. But what implications for life would be contained in such a
philosophy? Even if it be theoretically clarifying, through being
hospitable to all differences and adequate to the multifarious demands
of experience, is it not on that very account morally dreary and
stultifying? Is not its refusal to establish the universe upon moral
foundations destructive both of the validity of goodness, and of the
incentive to its attainment? Certainly not--if the validity of goodness
be determined by criteria of worth, and if the incentive to goodness be
the possibility of making that which merely exists, or is necessary,
also good.

This philosophy does not, it is true, define the good, but it makes
ethics autonomous, thus distinguishing the good which it defines, and
saving it from compromise with matter-of-fact, and logical or mechanical
necessity. The criticism of life is founded upon an independent basis,
and affords justification, of a selective and exclusive moral idealism.
Just because it is not required that the good shall be held accountable
for whatever is real, the ideal can be kept pure and intrinsically
worthy. The analogy of logic is most illuminating. If it be insisted
that whatever exists is logically necessary, logical necessity must be
made to embrace that from which it is distinguished by definition, such
as contradiction, mere empirical existence, and error. The consequence
is a logical chaos which has in truth forfeited the name of logic.
Similarly a goodness defined to make possible the deduction from it of
moral evil or moral indifference loses the very distinguishing
properties of goodness. The consequence is an ethical neutrality which
invalidates the moral will. A metaphysical neutrality, on the other
hand, although denying that reality as such is predestined to
morality--and thus affording no possibility of an ethical
absolutism--becomes the true ground for an ethical purism.

[Sidenote: The Incentive to Goodness.]