h a persistent
tropism to the consideration of the devil and his works, and how much it
has fought his elimination from the cosmic scheme! Yet never because it
loved the devil. The deep-lying reason is the fact that the humanization
of Evil into Devil mitigates Evil and improves the world. Philosophy has
been least free from this corrective and spiritizing bias. Though it has
cared less for the devil, it has predominantly repudiated aliency, has
sought to prove spirit the cause and substance of the world, and in that
degree, to transmute the aliency of nature into sameness with human
nature.

With unity and spirituality, _eternity_ makes a third. This norm is a
fundamental attribute of the One God himself, and interchangeable with
his ineffable name: the Lord is Eternal, and the Eternal, even more than
the One, receives the eulogium of exclusive realness. To the
philosophical tradition it is the most real. Once more the reason should
be obvious. The underlying urge which pushes the mind to think the world
as a unity pushes it even more inexorably to think the world as
timeless. For unity is asserted only against the perplexities of a
manyness which may be static and unchanging, and hence comparatively
simple. But eternity is asserted and set against mutability: it is the
negation of change, of time, of novelty, of the suddenness and
slaughter of the flux of life itself, which consumes what it generates,
undermines what it builds and sweeps to destruction what it founds to
endure. Change is the arch-enemy of a life which struggles for
self-_preservation_, of an intellect which operates spontaneously by the
logic of identity, of a will which seeks to convert others into sames.
It substitutes a different self for the old, it falsifies systems of
thought and deteriorates systems of life. It makes unity impossible and
manyness inevitable. It upsets every actual equilibrium that life
attains. It opens the doors and windows of every closed and comfortable
cosmos to all transcosmic winds that blow, with whatever they carry of
possible danger and possible ill. It is the very soul of chaos in which
the pleasant, ordered world is such a little helpless thing. Of this
change eternity is by primary intention the negation, as its
philological form shows. It is _not-time_, without positive intrinsic
content, and in its secondary significances, i.e., in those
significances which appear in metaphysical dialectic, without meaning;
since