us to co-operate in his purposes, and who furthers ours if they are worthy.  He works in an external environment, has limits, and has enemies.  When John Mill said that the notion of God’s omnipotence must be given up, if God is to be kept as a religious object, he was surely accurately right; yet so prevalent is the lazy monism that idly haunts the region of God’s name, that so simple and truthful a saying was generally treated as a paradox:  God, it was said, could not be finite.  I believe that the only God worthy of the name must be finite, and I shall return to this point in a later lecture.  If the absolute exist in addition—­and the hypothesis must, in spite of its irrational features, still be left open—­then the absolute is only the wider cosmic whole of which our God is but the most ideal portion, and which in the more usual human sense is hardly to be termed a religious hypothesis at all.  ‘Cosmic emotion’ is the better name for the reaction it may awaken.

Observe that all the irrationalities and puzzles which the absolute gives rise to, and from which the finite God remains free, are due to the fact that the absolute has nothing, absolutely nothing, outside of itself.  The finite God whom I contrast with it may conceivably have almost nothing outside of himself; he may already have triumphed over and absorbed all but the minutest fraction of the universe; but that fraction, however small, reduces him to the status of a relative being, and in principle the universe is saved from all the irrationalities incidental to absolutism.  The only irrationality left would be the irrationality of which pluralism as such is accused, and of this I hope to say a word more later.

I have tired you with so many subtleties in this lecture that I will add only two other counts to my indictment.

First, then, let me remind you that the absolute is useless for deductive purposes.  It gives us absolute safety if you will, but it is compatible with every relative danger.  You cannot enter the phenomenal world with the notion of it in your grasp, and name beforehand any detail which you are likely to meet there.  Whatever the details of experience may prove to be, after the fact of them the absolute will adopt them.  It is an hypothesis that functions retrospectively only, not prospectively. That, whatever it may be, will have been in point of fact the sort of world which the absolute was pleased to offer to itself as a spectacle.

Again, the absolute is always represented idealistically, as the all-knower.  Thinking this view consistently out leads one to frame an almost ridiculous conception of the absolute mind, owing to the enormous mass of unprofitable information which it would then seem obliged to carry.  One of the many reductiones ad absurdum of pluralism by which idealism thinks it proves the absolute One is as follows:  Let there be many facts; but since on idealist principles