formal sense something like a pluralism breaks out. When we speak of
the absolute we _take_ the one universal known material collectively
or integrally; when we speak of its objects, of our finite selves,
etc., we _take_ that same identical material distributively and
separately. But what is the use of a thing's _being_ only once if it
can be _taken_ twice over, and if being taken in different ways makes
different things true of it? As the absolute takes me, for example, I
appear _with_ everything else in its field of perfect knowledge. As
I take myself, I appear _without_ most other things in my field
of relative ignorance. And practical differences result from its
knowledge and my ignorance. Ignorance breeds mistake, curiosity,
misfortune, pain, for me; I suffer those consequences. The absolute
knows of those things, of course, for it knows me and my suffering,
but it doesn't itself suffer. It can't be ignorant, for simultaneous
with its knowledge of each question goes its knowledge of each answer.
It can't be patient, for it has to wait for nothing, having everything
at once in its possession. It can't be surprised; it can't be guilty.
No attribute connected with succession can be applied to it, for it
is all at once and wholly what it is, 'with the unity of a single
instant,' and succession is not of it but in it, for we are
continually told that it is 'timeless.'

Things true of the world in its finite aspects, then, are not true of
it in its infinite capacity. _Quâ_ finite and plural its accounts of
itself to itself are different from what its account to itself _quâ_
infinite and one must be.

With this radical discrepancy between the absolute and the relative
points of view, it seems to me that almost as great a bar to intimacy
between the divine and the human breaks out in pantheism as that which