but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the
victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence;
whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical
style of it.

These two systems are what you have to choose between if you turn to
the tender-minded school. And if you are the lovers of facts I have
supposed you to be, you find the trail of the serpent of
rationalism, of intellectualism, over everything that lies on that
side of the line. You escape indeed the materialism that goes with
the reigning empiricism; but you pay for your escape by losing
contact with the concrete parts of life. The more absolutistic
philosophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction that they never
even try to come down. The absolute mind which they offer us, the
mind that makes our universe by thinking it, might, for aught they
show us to the contrary, have made any one of a million other
universes just as well as this. You can deduce no single actual
particular from the notion of it. It is compatible with any state of
things whatever being true here below. And the theistic God is
almost as sterile a principle. You have to go to the world which he
has created to get any inkling of his actual character: he is the
kind of god that has once for all made that kind of a world. The God
of the theistic writers lives on as purely abstract heights as does
the Absolute. Absolutism has a certain sweep and dash about it,
while the usual theism is more insipid, but both are equally remote
and vacuous. What you want is a philosophy that will not only
exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make
some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human
lives.