Another form, and a very scholarly one, of the argument against the existence of an Absolute has been stated by Bax in the “Roots of Reality.” He appears to have reached the conclusion that the _telos_, the goal of human thought, is not an Absolute involving any notion of fixity, but that it may be conceived of as a “moving synthesis.” He argues that everything of which we are conscious in the universe is seen against a background which itself moves, and is only realisable or distinguishable if it shifts upon something relatively motionless behind it. He concludes, therefore, that by analogy there is no Absolute, since what we perceive always implies something against which we perceive it; thus that there is no goal by which and at which the spirit of man can find rest. On his theory we could never claim to reach the conception of an Absolute, though he admits the progressive character of human thought, and the increasing reach, lucidity, and depth of the human mind. The true answer to this argument is that it proves exactly what it sets out to disprove. As it is acknowledged that only the permanent or the relatively permanent can produce the phenomena of change, so _the appearance of the goal of thought as a moving synthesis would presuppose an Absolute as a ground reality_.[19] If in truth we were able to apprehend entirely the source of all life and the background of all experience, we might say that it did not exist for us _as an Absolute_, but the fact that whatever we perceive postulates an unending series behind it, carries with it the proof of an Absolute Infinite. (This conclusion is led up to by the mathematician’s idea of the series of all finite and transfinite ordinal numbers.) Some part of this argument has been already suggested in Ormond’s “Foundations of Knowledge,” and so far was used by Mr. Illingworth in the “Doctrine of the Trinity.”[20] “From a deeper metaphysical point of view it is the concept of evolution itself that must submit to the determination of knowledge, for it will be found that in so far as it becomes epistemologically necessary to ground relative processes in an Absolute experience, just so far will it become necessary also to connect the evolutionary aspect of the world itself with a ground reality that is stable, and involves the flux of change only as transcending and including it.”[21] The further answer that any judgment, even the Pragmatist’s “judgment of value,” implies an Absolute has been stated in his Oxford Lectures[22] by Professor H. Jones.