to which this theory leads. The energy which evolves the world is not self-existent and meaningless in itself. It does not work at random. It has its spring in Idea and purpose. Everything real has a reason for its existence. It is not due to chance or blind necessity, but to some need in the system of things, and it is in its fulfilment of purpose that reality consists. “Whatever is real is rational.” What does not meet some need, is unreal. And all lower reasons and goods converge towards higher ones, and ultimately towards the one wide end which closes all—the Good of Plato, the Theos of Aristotle, the Reason of Plotinus, the absolute Idea of Hegel, the supreme God of religious faith.
It is implied further that the world is a system in which the Future counts, sub specie aeterni, as well as the past and present. In the absolute Idea there are three moving correlatives, the past, the present and the future. The future is the world of unrealised potentiality,—of non-being. The future is not nothingness, any more than the past; and is not passive, but co-operates with past and present in making the flow of actuality. The future operates in the present as Idea. This unceasing flow of non-being into being, of Idea into actuality, constitutes Time. Time is not an unreal abstraction, nor an empty vessel into which events flow, but a factor of the eternal self-realising life. The absolute is not a thing which can be completed and finished off in a given time, but an essence containing infinite potentiality and energy of self-realisation, and its potentiality is Good pressing into actuality—the essence of God Almighty. But—
Does Idealism make God to be imperfect? It may be objected to this way of thinking that it seems to make God, the highest reality, to be imperfect; and to make the life of God to be an eternal effort to overcome imperfection, and at the same time to make that imperfection to
