’Aus dieser erde quellen meine freuden, und ihre sonne scheinet meinen leiden.’  I have neither eyes nor ears nor heart nor mind for anything of an opposite description, and the stagnant felicity of the absolute’s own perfection moves me as little as I move it.  If we were readers only of the cosmic novel, things would be different:  we should then share the author’s point of view and recognize villains to be as essential as heroes in the plot.  But we are not the readers but the very personages of the world-drama.  In your own eyes each of you here is its hero, and the villains are your respective friends or enemies.  The tale which the absolute reader finds so perfect, we spoil for one another through our several vital identifications with the destinies of the particular personages involved.

The doctrine on which the absolutists lay most stress is the absolute’s ‘timeless’ character.  For pluralists, on the other hand, time remains as real as anything, and nothing in the universe is great or static or eternal enough not to have some history.  But the world that each of us feels most intimately at home with is that of beings with histories that play into our history, whom we can help in their vicissitudes even as they help us in ours.  This satisfaction the absolute denies us; we can neither help nor hinder it, for it stands outside of history.  It surely is a merit in a philosophy to make the very life we lead seem real and earnest.  Pluralism, in exorcising the absolute, exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life we are at home in, and thus redeems the nature of reality from essential foreignness.  Every end, reason, motive, object of desire or aversion, ground of sorrow or joy that we feel is in the world of finite multifariousness, for only in that world does anything really happen, only there do events come to pass.

In one sense this is a far-fetched and rather childish objection, for so much of the history of the finite is as formidably foreign to us as the static absolute can possibly be—­in fact that entity derives its own foreignness largely from the bad character of the finite which it simultaneously is—­that this sentimental reason for preferring the pluralistic view seems small.[1] I shall return to the subject in my final lecture, and meanwhile, with your permission, I will say no more about this objection.  The more so as the necessary foreignness of the absolute is cancelled emotionally by its attribute of totality, which is universally considered to carry the further attribute of perfection in its train.  ‘Philosophy,’ says a recent american philosopher, ‘is humanity’s hold on totality,’ and there is no doubt that most of us find that the bare notion of an absolute all-one is inspiring.  ‘I yielded myself to the perfect whole,’ writes Emerson; and where can you find a more mind-dilating object?  A certain loyalty is called forth by the idea; even if not proved actual, it must be believed