"He was good, and no goodness can ever have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as possible."[352:2]
Plotinus, in whom Platonism is leavened by the spirit of an age which is convinced of sin, and which is therefore more keenly aware of the positive existence of the imperfect, follows out this suggestion. Creation is "emanation"--the overflow of God's excess of goodness. But one does not readily understand how goodness, desiring all things to be like itself, should thereupon create evil--even to make it good. The Aristotelian philosophy, with its conception of the gradation of substances, would seem to be better equipped to meet the difficulty. A development requires stages; and every finite thing may thus be perfect in its way and perfect in its place, while in the absolute truth or God there is realized the meaning of the whole order. But if so, there is evidently something that escapes God, to wit, the meaningless and unfitness, the error and evil, of the stages in their successive isolation. Nor is it of any avail to insist (as did Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza alike) that these are only privation, and therefore not to be counted in the sum of reality. For privation is itself an experience, with a great variety of implications, moral and psychological; and these cannot be attributed to God or deduced from him, in consideration of his absolute perfection.
The task of the new absolutism is now in clear view. The perfect must be amended to admit the imperfect. The absolute significance must be so construed as to provide for the evident facts; for the unmeaning things and changes of the natural order; for ignorance, sin, despair, and every human deficiency. The new philosophy is to solve this problem by defining a _spiritual absolute_, and by so construing the life or dynamics of spirit, as to demonstrate the necessity of the very imperfection and opposition which is so baffling to the realist.
[Sidenote: The Beginning of Absolute Idealism in Kant's Analysis of Experience.]