The Absolute

“ If we cannot, then, properly say that the Absolute, or the Universe,—or whatever may be our chosen name for the infinite individual which is the whole of existence,—is a self or person, can we say that the finite individuals which compose it are one and all selves, and that the Absolute is therefore a society of selves? ”

“ But the Absolute Experience and Will form, as we have asserted, one Unity of consciousness, one moment or instant of fulfilled life, over against which there is no external Other wherewith this whole could be contrasted. If I know myself by contrast with my neighbour or with my distant ideal, how can the Absolute, who has no neighbours, and no unfulfilled ideals, know such a contrast between himself and somebody else? In this sense, one would say, the Absolute must simply transcend self-consciousness. ”

“ How eagerly then he would peer into people's faces to note when "it" would begin to affect them, when the Absolute would creep into their being by the nose or ears or any other part, and begin to dissolve the hardness of their nature, overpower their personal tendencies, and cure their moral wounds; to watch the Absolute turn them up with its heavy plough, warm them, master them, and shape them anew; to see it lay open to them a world so marvellous and yet intrinsically so human, of wonders, ecstasy, enlightenment, inspiration and belief! ”

“ The theory of the Absolute, in particular, has had to be an article of faith, affirmed dogmatically and exclusively. The One and All, first in the order of being and of knowing, logically necessary itself, and uniting all lesser things in the bonds of mutual necessity, how could it allow of any mitigation of its inner rigidity? ”

“ These Absolutes seem to supersede matter, to transcend mind, and to supervene spirit. I am constantly confused and often perplexed by my inability to comprehend these complex transactions which I attribute to the presences and performances of the Unqualified Absolute, the Deity Absolute, and the Universal Absolute. ”

“ We owe it to the Absolute that we have a world of fact at all. 'A world' of fact!—that exactly is the trouble. An entire world is the smallest unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds work for the better ought to be done within this world, setting in at single points. Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal affairs, but the Absolute can do no piecework for us; so that all the interests which our poor souls compass raise their heads too late. We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world absolutely, before this world was born. ”

“ Still otherwise put, our whole argument for the Absolute implies that just because every thought of an object involves a beyond, as well as its own inclusion in the unity of the experience which embodies the beyond, therefore every thought is a moment in a world of fact which, in its wholeness, transcends mere thinking. Or, again, thought in itself is a mere abstraction from and yet in the whole of experience. But all this means that there must be, above every must, that which includes, indeed, the necessity expressed by the must, but transcends such necessity. ”

“ It is that of pure and unconditioned Being—the One—the Absolute. By a ruthless process of abstraction they have abjured the world of sense to vow allegiance to a mode of being of which nothing can be said without denying it. For even to allow a shadow of finiteness in the Absolute is to negate it; to define it is to annihilate it! It swallows up all conditions and relations without becoming any more knowable; it embraces everything and remains a pure negation. It lies totally and eternally beyond the reach of man's faculties and yet demands his perfect and unreasoning surrender. ”

“ This notion of an ALL-ENVELOPING NOETIC UNITY in things is the sublimest achievement of intellectualist philosophy. Those who believe in the Absolute, as the all-knower is termed, usually say that they do so for coercive reasons, which clear thinkers cannot evade. The Absolute has far-reaching practical consequences, some of which I drew attention in my second lecture. Many kinds of difference important to us would surely follow from its being true. ”

“ And therefore all finite aspiration must somehow be realised in the structure of the Absolute whole, though not necessarily in the way in which we, as beings of limited knowledge and goodness, actually wish it to be realised. The Absolute whole is thus, as nothing else can be, the concrete individual reality in which our ideals have actual existence. As all our ideals themselves are but so many expressions of our place in the system and our relation to the rest of it, so the system itself is their concrete harmonious embodiment. ”

“ Behold the degree of perfection to which Christian grace calls you, and the essential duty of a just soul.
Now, from the moment you give way to every inclination, provided it extends not to the absolute infraction of the precept, from the moment you confine yourselves to the essentials of the law; that you establish a kind of system of coldness and negligence; that you say to yourselves, "We are unable to support a more exact or more exemplary life;" — from that moment you renounce the desire of perfection. ”

“ Why might not our world of facts be of this sort, — an individual whole of mutually contingent parts, conforming to law in whole and in part, embodying universals, fulfilling ideas, yet with freedom not only for the whole but also for the parts? Why might not the Absolute Will be a complex of many wills in one unity of consciousness, and so its object be an Individual consisting of individuals, all expressive of law, but all still mutually free with a freedom that is a part of the freedom of the Whole? ”

“ The Absolute, then, possesses a logically complete form of self-consciousness. And the Absolute, as we have seen, is an Individual, whose life is known as the attentively selected fulfilment of its ideas, a fulfilment such that “no other” is admitted as genuinely possible. That selection of the possessed goal is, as we have seen, an absolutely free fact, and a fact of Will. It is free, because nothing in the Absolute Thought, as such, — unless, if you please, the very idea of free perfection, as such, — determines this fact of selection. But the freely selected goal is no single experience. ”

“ That which is absolute is free from admixture (as absolute alcohol) and in the highest and fullest sense free from imperfection or limitation; as, absolute holiness and love are attributes of God alone. In philosophical language, absolute signifies free from all necessary, or even from all possible relations, not dependent or limited, unrelated and unconditioned; truth immediately known, as intuitive truth, is absolute; God, as self-existent and free from all limitation or dependence, is called the absolute Being, or simply the Absolute. ”

“ Again, when we call the Absolute the principle of all existence, we have the notion merely of a first cause. When, however, we call it the essence of things, and then prove from it that all things are but modes of this first cause, it is evident that we are begging the question. We first make the Absolute the essence of all things, and then prove that all things are but this essence. ”

“ The Absolute has been missing from this kingdom—and for all I know, from the Universe—since half- past six o'clock this morning. No one regrets its absence more than I. There can be no comfort, no peace, no order, without an Absolute. But we must face the facts. The Absolute is gone, and this kingdom will be without one until I restore it with my own hands. I shall set about doing so immediately. And meanwhile, old man, you had better seek some safe corner where my misguided populace cannot lay hands on you. ”

“ If we may not say without qualification that the Absolute is good, and certainly must not say that it is in the proper sense “ethical,” still less may we say that the Absolute is “morally indifferent.” ”

“ To know the nature of the Absolute as such, to present the Absolute to finite minds as it must be presented, if that be possible, to the Absolute itself, must ever remain impossible to man. But it is equally true that to attempt such a task has never been the urgent mission of Philosophy. ”

“ For the Absolute as Knower knows the Absolute Will as the determining factor merely, whereby the world of the Knower himself gets its wholeness, and so its unity; while the Absolute Will is attentive to precisely such arrest of the “unreal possibilities” of our former account — to precisely such wholeness of the divine Experience — as shall individuate, and so complete, the data which are experienced, and the world wherein the Thinker conceives, and the Seer views, the fulfilment of the Absolute Knowledge in the data which are experienced. ”

“ In our godless world the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be established without great sacrifices and confusion of doctrine. Nevertheless I say unto you: Give yourself up with your whole beings to the Absolute; believe in God, in whatsoever form He may declare Himself to you. ”

“ In the world what has come to pass is that the Absolute has been revealed as the concrete, and, further, not only in thought in a general way as intelligible world, but because it has in itself proceeded to its ultimate point of intensity. Thus it is an actual self, an “I,” the absolute universal, the concrete universal, that is God; and also the absolute opposite of this determination, the clearly finite as it exists in space and time, but this finite determined in unity with the eternal as self. ”

“ And, what is more, this moment of reality is pertinent to the Absolute, because the Absolute, as infinite negativity, contains this self-relation—as simple unity of knowledge at home with itself, and therewith as immediacy—for the final consummation of its activity. On account also of this its immediate existence, which is rooted in the Absolute itself, the Absolute declares itself not as the one jealous God, who merely annuls the aspect of Nature and finite human existence, without revealing itself verily therein under the mode of actual divine subjectivity ”

“ The Creator has implanted in the creature a power of choice between good and evil, which is a pale reflexion of His own tremendous Being. But how can we even imagine the dependent, the limited, the finite, acting independently of the will of the Absolute and Infinite? ”

“ The Absolute is a self-conscious individual, and the only ultimately real individual, because the only ultimately and absolutely whole individual. As such the Absolute is unique, embodies one Will, and realises this will in the unity of its one life. ”

“ Again, if we speak of the Absolute as a society of finite individuals, we ought at least to be careful in guarding ourselves against misunderstanding. Such an expression has certainly some manifest advantages. It brings out both the spiritual character of the system of existence and the fact that, though it contains a plurality of finite selves and contains them without discord, it is not properly thought of as a self, but as a community of many selves. ”

“ Meanwhile, both the Absolute and the finite individual are true individuals. The Absolute, as individual, is One; the finite individuals, as such, are many. They are not confounded with one another. They do not slip as dewdrops into any sort of a shining sea. They are individuals, constitutive of an Individual. And the “City of God” is God, while its citizens are free and finite individuals. No finite individual possesses the wholeness, the grade of reality, which the Absolute possesses. ”

“ Through this enlarged conception the Absolute is for the first time essentially concrete, that is self-determination, and thereby essential unity, whose particular antitheses, as parts of a process, appear to consciousness as the different determinations of one and the same God. For the necessity of giving essential definition to the absolute significance is just that which at this stage it is felt to be of first importance to satisfy. ”

“ We declared that the Absolute is the whole system of which the finite experience is a moment or a fragment. Therefore, our Absolute in no sense explains the world as a cause, but possesses the world of fact, precisely as fact. In this sense, the constitution of reality is indeed, from the absolute point of view, something that, despite all the mediations, the relationships, the dependencies present in the world, is in its wholeness immediate — a datum, underived from anything external to itself. In this sense, then, we are not arguing that the Absolute must will, but only that it does will. ”

“ The position, as I understand it, is, that, from the point of view of the Absolute, what we call Evil and what we call Good simply have no existence. Good and Evil, in our sense, are mere appearances; and Good, in the absolute sense, is identical with the Absolute or with God? ”

“ All things, even in an eternal universe of limitless values and divine qualities, may, and oftentimes do, change except the Absolutes and that which has attained the physical status, intellectual embrace, or spiritual identity which is absolute. ”

“ The Absolute, then, in the only logically possible sense of the term, is through and through pervaded by self-consciousness. That is, the Absolute Unity is the unity of a variety of mutually interrelated and interpenetrating conscious functions, which, while contrasted, essentially refer to one another, and are fulfilled each in and through the others, so that they may well be called, by virtue of the contrast, conscious Selves, each being conscious that the other Selves, his Divine fellows, are in essence but himself fulfilled and wholly expressed. ”