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 chapter, this is not permissible. We found that there is a balance of pleasure over and above pain, and we know from experience that in a mixed state such a balance may be pleasant. And we are sure that the Absolute possesses and enjoys somehow this balance of pleasure. But to go further seems impossible. Pleasure may conceivably be so supplemented and modified by addition, that it does not remain precisely that which we call pleasure. Its pleasantness certainly could not be lost, but it might be blended past recognition with other aspects of the Whole. The Absolute then, perhaps, strictly, does not feel pleasure. But, if so, that is only because it has something in which pleasure is included.

But at this point we are met by the doubt, with which already we have partly dealt (Chapter xiv.). Is our conclusion, after all, the right one? Is it not possible, after all, that in the Absolute there is a balance of pain, or, if not of pain, of something else which is at all events no better? On this difficult point I will state at once the result which seems true. Such a balance is possible in the lowest sense of barely possible. It does not seem to me unmeaning, nor can I find that it is self-contradictory. If we try to deny that the Absolute is one and is experience, our denial becomes unmeaning, or of itself turns round into an assertion. But I do not see that this is the case with a denial of happiness.

It is true that we can know nothing of pain and pleasure except from our experience. It is true that in that experience well-nigh everything points in one direction. There is, so far as I know, not one special fact which suggests that pain is compatible with unity and concord. And, if so, why should we not insist, “Such is the nature of pain, and hence to deny this nature is to fall into self-contradiction”? What, in short, is the other possibility which has not been included? I will endeavour to state it.

The world that we can observe is certainly not