Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/284

Rh playing with bubbles” of the old philosopher. Everything about the process of evolution becomes intelligible and full of purpose — except the fact that there should be any process at all where all was in, and of, and for the universal reason at the outset. The infinite power has been playing with perfection as a cat with a mouse, letting it run away a few aeons in time, that it might be caught once more in a little chase, involving the history of some millions of worlds of life. Is this a worthy conception? Nay, is it not a self-contradictory one? Evolution and creative Reason — are they compatible? Yes, indeed, when the evolution is ended, the hurly-burly done, the battle lost and won; but meanwhile — ? In short, either evolution is a necessity, one of the twelve labors of this Hercules-Absolute, or else it is irrational. In the one case the Absolute must be conceived as in bonds, in the other case the Logos must be conceived as blundering. Both conceptions are rank nonsense. This kind of Monism will not satisfy critical demands.

And then there is the objection, stated by Schopenhauer, and by we know not how many before him, and that we have already insisted upon, namely, that every historical conception of the world as a whole, every attempt to look upon Being as a rational process in time, as a perpetual evolution from a lower to a higher, is beset by the difficulty that after an infinite time the infinite process is still in a very early stage. Infinitely progressing, always growing better, and yet reaching after all this eternity of work only the incoherent, troublous, blind