Note 220 — Chapter V · SOME METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ETHICS AND RELIGION

I am afraid that this essentially irreligious feeling has a great deal to do with the complaints sometimes urged against the Absolute as a poor substitute for a “living God.” Partly these complaints spring, no doubt, from the mistaken notion that the Absolute is not a concrete individual but a mere “collective concept.” But they seem also to be motived by a suspicion that a finite Deity might be more amenable than the Absolute to our wish to have our ideals gratified in our own fashion. And so far as this is the motive of them, such complaints are essentially impious.