pre-supposing refractory materials and excluded from eternal truth by
its very essence. The only function those traditional metaphors have is
to shield confusion and sentimentality. Because Jehovah once fought for
the Jews, we need not continue to say that the truth is solicitous about
us, when it is only we that are fighting to attain it. The universe can
wish particular things only in so far as particular beings wish them;
only in its relative capacity can it find things good, and only in its
relative capacity can it be good for anything.

The efficacious or physical order which exists at any moment in the
world and out of which the next moment's order is developed, may
accordingly be termed a relative chaos: a chaos, because the values
suggested and supported by the second moment could not have belonged to
the first; but merely a relative chaos, first because it probably
carried values of its own which rendered it an order in a moral and
eulogistic sense, and secondly because it was potentially, by virtue of
its momentum, a basis for the second moment's values as well.

[Sidenote: In experience order is relative to interests, which determine
the moral status of all powers.]

Human life, when it begins to possess intrinsic value, is an incipient
order in the midst of what seems a vast though, to some extent, a
vanishing chaos. This reputed chaos can be deciphered and appreciated by
man only in proportion as the order in himself is confirmed and
extended. For man's consciousness is evidently practical; it clings to
his fate, registers, so to speak, the higher and lower temperature of
his fortunes, and, so far as it can, represents the agencies on which
those fortunes depend. When this dramatic vocation of consciousness has
not been fulfilled at all, consciousness is wholly confused; the world