316 BERNAED BOSANQUET : HEDONISM AMONG IDEALISTS. by metaphysical considerations, but we can justify by meta- physical considerations the logical effort which is always constructing particulars in obedience to the idea. Though our morality is tinged with falsehood throughout, yet we know that it is truth, relevant and relative to our life, in as far as it pursues the line of effort which the nature of reason involves. And we know that somewhere in the central tendencies of this effort, the tendencies whose negation would be to us the most fundamental contradiction, there lie characters continuous with and implying those of ultimate perfection. After all, the Absolute needs us and our conduct just as we need it. We are in it, now if ever, and we can hold to it, if at all, with the full breadth of reason and need not allow our grasp to be attenuated to a thread of hope. Our experience, we must remember, is in one sense a fuller revelation than an abstract idea of ultimate reality, if in another it is less perfect. Its backwardness is due to the magnitude of the enterprise which it implies ; for it demands and begins the harmonisation of a total world, and not merely the anticipation of its general nature.
