Page:Essays on Truth and Reality (1914).djvu/265

246 tenable is to regard it as a single Experience, superior to relations and containing in the fullest sense everything which is. Whether there is any particular matter in this whole which falls outside of any finite centre of feeling, I cannot certainly decide ; but the contrary seems perhaps more probable.1 We have then the Absolute Reality appearing in and to finite centres and uniting them in one experience. We can, I think, understand more or less what, in order for this to be done, such an experience must be. But to comprehend it otherwise is beyond us and even beyond all intelligence. The immanence of the Absolute in finite centres, and of finite centres in the Absolute, I have always set down as inexplicable. Those for whom philosophy has to explain everything need therefore not trouble themselves with my views. Whether on the other hand the doctrine which I hold is intelligible and thinkable, depends, I should say, on the meaning which you like to give to these ambiguous terms. To myself this doctririe appears at least to have a positive sense and meaning which I am able clearly to apprehend. And in the main I inherited this doctrine from others, and find myself sharing it with others, to whom it seemed and seems intelligible. But in what follows I of course am speaking only for myself.

No one, I think, will understand such a view if he makes a mistake as to the given fact from which in a sense it starts. There are those for whom the outer world is one given fact, and again the world of my self another fact ; and there are others for whom only one of these two facts is ultimate. It is in philosophy a common doctrine that there is immediate certainty only on the side of my self, a basis from which I should have thought that Solipsism must demonstrably follow. If you start from the absolute reality of your self, you need not puzzle yourself as to how you are to leave this ground and leap to a transcendent Reality. You may,

1 But on this difficult point see Chap. XI, pp. 350-1.