Page:Appearance and Reality (1916).djvu/245

 It is the one source of our experience, and every element of the world must submit to pass through it. And the “this,” secondly, has a genuine feature of ultimate reality. With however great imperfection and inconsistency it owns an individual character. The “this” is real for us in a sense in which nothing else is real.

Reality is being in which there is no division of content from existence, no loosening of “what” from “that.” Reality, in short, means what it stands for, and stands for what it means. And the “this” possesses to some extent the same wholeness of character. Both the “this” and reality, we may say, are immediate. But reality is immediate because it includes and is superior to mediation. It developes, and it brings to unity, the distinctions it contains. The “this” is immediate, on the other side, because it is at a level below distinctions. Its elements are but conjoined, and are not connected. And its content, hence, is unstable, and essentially tends to disruption, and by its own nature must pass beyond the being of the “this.” But every “this” still shows a passing aspect of undivided singleness. In the mental background specially such a fused unity remains a constant factor, and can never be dissipated (Chapters ix., x., xxvii.). And it is such an unbroken wholeness which gives the sense of individual reality. When we turn from mere ideas to sensation, we experience in the “this” a revelation of freshness and life. And that revelation, if misleading, is never quite untrue.

We may, for the present, take “this” as the positive feeling of direct experience. In that sense it will be either general or special. It will be the