experience which ascends the pathway of science by perpetual criticism of experience less organised, and perpetual detection of ignorance. The Real-Ideal thus turns out to be that Omniscience which is the eternal clutch holding together the two sides of experience, and holding all possible forms and stages of experience in its life-giving, knowledge-assuring, reality-building grasp. Grant the accuracy and the necessity of the fundamental premise, — grant the truth of this inseparable union of pure thought with sense, of this interdependence of the rational and the sensory, — and the case is closed. The immanent Omniscience is then shown “real,” in this overspanning meaning of that word, and nothing but such an immanent Omniscience can be made out real.
There is the whole anatomy of the argument, in brief. If its fundamental premise is true, it is certainly unanswerable; and we shall be compelled to put up with this as the true account of the Absolute, whether we choose to give it the title of God or not; nay, we shall have perforce to call it God, or else confess that this name has nothing answering to it but a baseless figment of fantasy. And yet I think it not too much to say, that, while this conception is thus made to appear as the only sound result of reason, its real meaning is no sooner realised than reason disowns it. By some slip, through some oversight, a changeling has been put into the cradle of Reason, but Reason, when she sees it, knows that it is none of hers. Professor Royce rightly says that it is not the conception of an Ineffable Mystery, which we can only silently adore. For, in very fact,
