If the basis of our faith in the world-order is the conviction that the Ideas of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are fully real and fully operative, we must try to form some clear notion of what these Ideas mean, and how they are related to each other.  The goal of Truth, as an absolute value, is unity, which in the outer world means harmony, in the intercourse of spirit with spirit, love; and in the inner world, peace or happiness.  The goal of Goodness as an absolute value is the realisation of the ought-to-be in victorious moral effort.  Beauty is the self-recognition of creative Spirit in its own works; it is the expression of Nature’s own deepest character.  Beauty gives neither information nor advice; but it satisfies a part of our nature which is not less Divine than that which pays homage to Truth and Goodness.

Now, these absolute values are supra-temporal.  If the soul were in time, no value could arise; for time is always hurling its own products into nothingness, and the present is an unextended point, dividing an unreal past from an unreal future.  The soul is not in time; time is rather in the soul.  Values are eternal and indestructible.  When Plotinus says that ‘nothing that really is can ever perish’ (hapolehitai ohyden thon honton), and when Hoeffding says that ’no value perishes out of the world,’ they are saying the same thing.  In so far as we can identify ourselves in thought and mind with the absolute values, we are sure of our immortality.

But it will be said that in the first place this promise of immortality carries with it no guarantee of survival in time, and in the second place that it offers us, at last, only an impersonal immortality.  Let us take these two objections in turn, though they are in reality closely connected.

We must not regard time as an external, inhuman, unconscious process.  Time is the frame of soul-life; outside this it has no existence.  The entire cosmic process is the life-frame of the universal Soul, the Divine Logos.  With this life we are vitally connected, however brief and unimportant the span and the task of an individual career may seem to us.  If my particular life-meaning passes out of activity, it will be because the larger life, to which I belong, no longer needs that form of expression.  My death, like my birth, will have a teleological justification, to which my supra-temporal self will consent.  When a good man’s work in this world is done, when he is able to say, without forgetting his many failures, ’I have finished the work that Thou gavest me to do,’ surely his last word will be, ’Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace’; not, ’Grant that I may flit for a while over my former home, and hear what is happening to my country and my family.’  We may leave it to our misguided necromancers to describe the adventures of the disembodied ghost—­

    ’Quo cursu deserta petiverit, et quibus ante
     Infelix sua tecta supervolitaverit alis.’