d becomes God. But divinity, in
becoming one and unique, becomes also transcendent. Monotheism pushes
God altogether beyond the sensible environment. Personality, instead of
being the nature of the world, has become its ground and cause, and all
that mankind loves is conserved, in order that man, whom God loves, may
have his desire and live forever. Life is eternal and happiness
necessary, beyond nature,--in heaven. Finally, in transcendental
idealism, the poles meet; what has been put eternally apart is eternally
united; the immaterial, impalpable, transcendent heaven is made one and
continuous with the gross and unhappy natural world. One _is_ the other;
the other the one. God _is_ the world and transcends it; _is_ the evil
and the good which conquers and consumes that evil. The environment
becomes thus described as a single, eternal, conscious unity, in which
all the actual but transitory values of the actual but transitory life
are conserved and eternalized. In a description of God such as Royce's
or Aristotle's the environment is the eternity of all its constituents
that are dearest to man. Religion, which began as a definition of the
environment as it moved and controlled mankind, ends by describing it
as mankind desires it to be. The environment is now the aforementioned
ideal socius or self which satisfies perfectly all human requirements.
Pluralistic and quarrelsome animism has become monistic and harmonious
spiritism. Forces have turned to excellences and needs to satisfactions.
Necessity has been transmuted to Providence, sin has been identified
with salvation, value with existence, and existence with impotence and
illusion before Providence, salvation, and value.

VII

With this is completed the reply to the question: Why do men contradict
their own experience? Experience is, as Spinoza says, passion and
action, both inextricably mingled and coincident, with the good and evil
of them as interwoven as they. That piecemeal conquest of the evil which
we call civilization has not even the promise of finality. It is a
Penelope's web, always needing to be woven anew. Now, in experience
desire anticipates and outleaps action and fact rebuffs desire. Desire
realizes itself, consequently, in ideas objectified by the power of
speech into independent and autonomous subjects of discourse, whereby
experience is One, Eternal, a Spirit or Spiritually Controlled, wherein
man has Freedom and Immortality. These, the consta