gement,
favourable to a given form of life, but any arrangement whatsoever. The
process by which an arrangement which is essentially unstable gradually
shifts cannot be said to aim at every stage which at any moment it
involves. For the process passes beyond. It presently abolishes all the
forms which may have arrested attention and generated love; its initial
energy defeats every purpose which we may fondly attribute to it. Nor is
it here necessary to remind ourselves that to call results their own
causes is always preposterous; for in this case even the mythical sense
which might be attached to such language is inapplicable. Here the
process, taken in the gross, does not, even by mechanical necessity,
support the value which is supposed to guide it. That value is realised
for a moment only; so that if we impute to Cronos any intent to beget
his children we must also impute to him an intent to devour them.

[Sidenote: Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent, indifferent.]

Of course the various states of the world, when we survey them
retrospectively, constitute another and now static order called historic
truth. To this absolute and impotent order every detail is essential. If
we wished to abuse language so much as to speak of will in an "Absolute"
where change is excluded, so that nothing can be or be conceived beyond
it, we might say that the Absolute willed everything that ever exists,
and that the eternal order terminated in every fact indiscriminately;
but such language involves an after-image of motion and life, of
preparation, risk, and subsequent accomplishment, adventures all
pre-supposing refractory materials and excluded from eternal truth by
its very essence. The only function those traditional metaphors have is
to shield confusion and sentimentality. Because Jehovah once fought for
the Jews, we need not continue to say that the truth is solicitous about
us, when it is only we that are fighting to attain it. The universe can
wish particular things only in so far as particular beings wish them;
only in its relative capacity can it find things good, and only in its
relative capacity can it be good for anything.

The efficacious or physical order which exists at any moment in the
world and out of which the next moment's order is developed, may
accordingly be termed a relative chaos: a chaos, because the values
suggested and supported by the second moment could not have belonged to
the first; but merel