Page:Appearance and Reality (1916).djvu/542

 extent has been transformed by internal distinction, but it has also now itself become a factor in a new felt totality. The emotion as an object, and, on the other side, that background to which in consciousness it is opposed, have both become subordinate elements in a new psychical whole of feeling (Chapter xix.). Our experience is always from time to time a unity which, as such, is destroyed in becoming an object. But one such emotional whole in its destruction gives place inevitably to another whole. And hence what we feel, while it lasts, is felt always as one, yet not as simple nor again as broken into terms and relations.

From such an experience of unity below relations we can rise to the idea of a superior unity above them. Thus we can attach a full and positive meaning to the statement that Reality is one. The stubborn objector seems condemned, in any case, to affirm the following propositions. In the first place Reality is positive, negation falling inside it. In the second place it is qualified positively by all the plurality which it embraces and subordinates. And yet itself, in the third place, is certainly not plural. Having gone so far I myself prefer, as the least misleading course, to assert its unity.

Beyond all doubt then it is clear that Reality is one. It has unity, but we must go on to ask, a unity of what? And we have already found that all we know consists wholly of experience. Reality must be, therefore, one Experience, and to doubt this conclusion is impossible.

We can discover nothing that is not either feeling or thought or will or emotion or something else of the kind (Chapter xiv.). We can find nothing but this, and to have an idea of anything else is plainly impossible. For such a supposed idea is either meaningless, and so is not an idea, or else its meaning will be found tacitly to consist in experience.