Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/171

153 should be reality and progress at all is doubtless a mystery. But meanwhile the truth seems to be that both empiricism and absolutism are in a sense true.

The essential feature of absolutism, as embodied for example in the systems of Mr. Bradley and Professor Royce, consists in its doctrine of an eternal or timeless reality. Both these writers rightly maintain that reality is experience, but they insist that all the diversity of the universe as we know it is taken up into an absolute experience. They say much that is suggestive and inspiring; but the difficulty with both theories (and they are the best exponents of this point of view) is that they seem to think of the absolute reality as all-inclusive and all-exhaustive in the sense of being already completed,—there once for all, all wound up or frozen into a solid block of perfection.

The greatest difficulty of the absolutist is how to get variety, change, and finite values into his eternal reality without infecting it with their phenomenal character. How, if the Absolute is such as he describes it, can there be any finite at all? Yet he insists that all finite appearances somehow belong to reality, all our fragmentary experiences are taken up into the eternal consciousness. The problem is, How can the Absolute have change belonging to it as a genuine part of its nature and yet not itself be subject to change? It never seems to have occurred to him to begin at the other end, and say that change in some way must have an absolute significance, since it is so fundamental a character of our experience.

Why should we deny to the Absolute the character which by common consent it is most disparaging to the relative and finite being to lack? Why should we attribute to ultimate reality the static character of completedness, when we regard this as indicative of death and decay in our own experience ? Who of us would wish for an experience, no matter how large or how exhaustive, provided that this meant the end of all capacity for growth, expansion,—and evolution of the new? We wouldn't take the Absolute for a gift if it meant this,—if it meant that there would be nothing more to do, nothing more to feel, nothing more to think! What gives zest and interest and