ational." To {312} doubt it is a
self-contradiction. Or, to put the same thing in another way, reason
is the Absolute. And to ask why it is better to be rational is to
demand that the ultimate should be expressed in terms of something
beyond it. Hence modern science has no philosophy of evolution,
whereas Aristotle has. [Footnote 16]

[Footnote 16: See H. S. Macran's _Hegel's Doctrine of Formal Logic_
(Clarendon Press), Introduction, section on the Conception of
Evolution, to which I am much indebted in the above paragraphs.]

The main idea of pantheism is that everything is God. The clod of
earth is divine because it is a manifestation of Deity. Now this idea
is all very well, and is in fact essential to philosophy. We find it
in Aristotle himself, since the entire world is, for him, the
actualization of reason, and reason is God. But this is also a very
dangerous idea, if not supplemented by a rationally grounded scale of
values. No doubt everything is, in a sense, God. But if we leave it at
this, it would follow that, since everything is equally divine, there
is no higher and lower. If the clod of earth, like the saintliest man,
is God, and there is no more to say of the matter, then how is the
saint higher than the clod of earth? Why should one ever struggle
towards higher things, when in reality all are equally high? Why avoid
evil, when evil is as much a manifestation of God as good? Mere
pantheism must necessarily end in this calamitous view. And these
deplorable effects explain the fact that Hinduism, with all its high
thinking, finds room for the worship of cows and snakes, and, with all
its undoubted moral elevation, yet allows into its fold the grossest
abominations. Both these features are due to the pantheistic placing
of all things on a par as equally {313} divine. Not of course that
Hinduism has not a sort of doctrine of evolution, a belief in a higher
and lower. As everyone knows, it admits the belief that in successive
incarnations the soul may mount higher and higher till it perhaps
rejoins the common source of all things. There is probably no race of
man so savage that it does not instinctively feel that there is a
higher and lower, a better and worse, in things. But the point is
that, although Hinduism has its scale of values, and its doctrine of
development, it has no rational foundation for these, and though it
has the idea of higher and lower, yet, because this is without
foundation, it lets it