substance of the world. In the ultimate reality we cannot think of the form as being in one place, and the energy as being in another. They require no foreign power to put them together. “There the twain together be.” Form is what is good in itself, or what should be. As such it is not an empty abstraction but is correlative with an energy which makes it to be. The energy is not itself an empty abstraction, but the doing of something, viz., the realising of the form.. Neither ultimate form nor ultimate energy is anything apart from the other; together, they are the one creative Absolute. Hence—
Idea as the ultimate source of Energy and Form, realising itself in eternal process.—Hence we must conceive the ultimate ground of the world as Idea, transforming itself from the abstract potentiality of what should be, into the concrete reality of what is; and the substance of the world, material and mental, as the energy of its so doing. And we must conceive this energy as due to this, that it is the nature of the good or what should be, to raise itself into actuality. The creative power of the world is the Divine Idea.
Why a process?—But the question may be asked, if the Idea thus contains in itself the power of self-realisation, why then does it not realise itself completely and instantaneously like a flash of lightning,—out of place out of time—without any process. Why should this endless process in time and space be needed? The reason clearly is, that it is just in the process of space and time that the realisation consists. A timeless world would be a lifeless abstraction, if it could be said to have any being at all. The concrete reality of the world supposes both Idea and power which is above space and time, and its perpetual realisation in things and events in space and time. The eternal would be nothing without the world of changing things in which it expresses itself, and the world of things would be nothing without the eternal ground out of which they rise. The Absolute would be nothing without the relative, and the relative would be nothing without the
