human thought would be impossible in its bosom; but this nature must be
presumed to have an order, an order directly importing, if the tendency
of its movement be taken into account, all the complexities and
beauties, all the sense and reason which exist now. Order is accordingly
continual; but only when order means not a specific arrangement,
favourable to a given form of life, but any arrangement whatsoever. The
process by which an arrangement which is essentially unstable gradually
shifts cannot be said to aim at every stage which at any moment it
involves. For the process passes beyond. It presently abolishes all the
forms which may have arrested attention and generated love; its initial
energy defeats every purpose which we may fondly attribute to it. Nor is
it here necessary to remind ourselves that to call results their own
causes is always preposterous; for in this case even the mythical sense
which might be attached to such language is inapplicable. Here the
process, taken in the gross, does not, even by mechanical necessity,
support the value which is supposed to guide it. That value is realised
for a moment only; so that if we impute to Cronos any intent to beget
his children we must also impute to him an intent to devour them.

[Sidenote: Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent, indifferent.]

Of course the various states of the world, when we survey them
retrospectively, constitute another and now static order called historic
truth. To this absolute and impotent order every detail is essential. If
we wished to abuse language so much as to speak of will in an "Absolute"
where change is excluded, so that nothing can be or be conceived beyond
it, we might say that the Absolute willed everything that ever exists,
and that the eternal order terminated in every fact indiscriminately;
but such language involves an after-image of motion and life, of
preparation, risk, and subsequent accomplishment, adventures all