Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/57

 THE ABSOLUTE AS UNKNOWABLE. 43 it on our part is, like all intellectual acts, discursive and relational. To make the real object merely relational, how- ever, is to lose sight of the fact that this relational form of thinking, even in our own experience, is not ultimate, but only a means to an end, which we should have no need of if we did not start with a knowledge that was partial and incomplete. Accordingly, while we can never experience objects directly, but must always approach them indirectly by the way of judgment, we can believe that there is a direct experience in which they exist, and in which the discursive form of thinking entirely disappears, as it tends to disappear in the activities to which our own thought leads up. Of course in this ultimate experience the object does not play the same part that it does in ours ; the chair is not God's act of sitting down. We are constantly making this dis- tinction between the objective purpose of a thing, and its subjective, teleological use with reference to our own lives. And in detail we can never tell just how objects enter into God's activity of consciousness. The general nature and meaning of his life we may, without egotism, suppose that we are getting gradually to know in the higher, or social, content of human life, but this does not tell us how any particular thing is related to this purpose. We can only discover the mechanical laws of this framework of the eternal consciousness, as represented in the relation of objects to one another, not to the meaning which they subserve. But if we suppose such an ever-flowing stream of conscious purpose, we have a principle of explanation for external things ; they are the elements of this conscious life, as in the poet's dream the various images form the stuff of his inspired vision elements which we cannot relate in detail to the whole, but which, nevertheless, we can believe are so connected, and thus are lifted above the merely relational form of existence which they present to us when we think them. Nor, on this theory, do we need to put outside the real existence of the object even its relation to human use ; it is this, too, though it is vastly more than this. We need not suppose that cork trees were made for the sole and express convenience of the bottlers ; this is on the face of it absurd. And yet, in point of fact, corks are made from the cork tree, and they fill a certain place in life, and so they cannot be wholly foreign to a reality which covers the entire sphere of existence. In the displacement of the theological by the scientific spirit, we have passed to an entirely exagger- ated disparagement of the importance of the human element in the universe. If corks are made, we must suppose that