Be they what they
may, the Absolute will father them. Like the sick lion in Esop's
fable, all footprints lead into his den, but nulla vestigia
retrorsum. You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by the
Absolute's aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detail
important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives you
indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal
way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by
your own temporal devices.
Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its
capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of
minds. But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it
doesn't suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is
eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the
rationalistic temper. It disdains empiricism's needs. It substitutes
a pallid outline for the real world's richness. It is dapper; it is
noble in the bad sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be
inapt for humble service. In this real world of sweat and dirt, it
seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to
count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic
disqualification.
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