a cheat, although the Absolute Life is clear and sure? If this last may be the case, then what do I care for the Absolute? For then his truth is not what I call ‘spiritual.’ But if the Absolute’s organisation insures the truth of any and all finite ideas, merely in so far as somebody holds them, where is the distinction between truth and error? I demand, then, a guiding principle, whereby I can distinguish true from illusory types of finite ideas. And I demand this principle from philosophy as such, and decline to be merely sent back to the realm of common-sense.” Now the demand thus defined is indeed fair enough. And while our former abstract statement failed to furnish an explicit answer to this demand, it did indicate the criterion which I have just applied to the questions stated by Professor Mezes, and which serves, rightly applied, to meet all questions that can fairly be asked of the philosopher, and that are not directly practical problems about the mere plausibilities of the world of common-sense, viewed as such mere plausibilities.
The criterion in question is not hard to state. As finite being you can err, you can dream, you can suffer from illusions, you can go insane; in brief, your finite judgment is never infallible. Just in your fallibility lies, as I have shown in my above-cited chapter on “The Possibility of Error” (The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Chapter XI), one ground for the proof that the Absolute is, and is infallible. But now, when you err, you still form an idea of the beyond; and this idea really refers to, bears upon, and so belongs to, the world that includes the be-
