Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/56

 42 A. K. ROGERS: be met. That we should understand a fact, in distinction from simply having to admit it as a, fact, has no assignable meaning except by reference to end or purpose. Of course, in any experience of ours, we come short of a self-existent and self -intelligible reality. Our experience is only a small part of the whole world, and so it can neither stand alone when we come to examine it, nor can it avoid the necessity of constantly having to stop and think, in order to adjust itself to new circumstances which lie outside of and condition it. An absolute reality would, on the contrary, contain all conditions within itself, and contain them consciously ; every so-called past event would, in its relations, be eternally present ; a step once taken would not drop from memory, as it does with us, and only persist as a de facto condition of present con- sciousness ; it would persist consciously, as an influence which had its share in directing the course of future accom- plishment. But while we have to recognise that any actual experience of ours falls short of representing adequately what the life of God must be, this does not prevent its exhibiting essentially the same general features ; and if we thus get the type of reality in our own lives, it is comparatively an easy task to apply it to the outer world. What an object really means for us is its relation to our own activities. A chair means the act of sitting, paper the act of writing, a gun the act of shooting. Apart from such a unity of end, the object is but a congeries of relations, which we can think only discursively, by passing from one relation to another. But when the object is actually being used, those elements in it which have a bearing upon the end in view may come into an altogether more intimate sort of connexion. Here the whole act, and so the object as it enters into the act, may be bound together by the abiding presence in consciousness of the end towards which the action is directed an end which is not something separate from the action, but which is itself realised in the various related steps which make up the action's progress. Relations are still there, in the sense that we have a complex whole whose parts can only be thought as related ; but they are not felt as mere relations, but as phases of the inner unity of the act. Of course, however, metaphysically speaking, the act is not. literally the object ; as a means to the accomplishment of the act it can stand to us for the service it performs, but in itself it is a member of an independent and permanent world. This world never enters bodily into any experience of ours, and so we get at it in the first place only as a fact which we perceive or think about ; and this knowledge of