Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 4.djvu/360

 and from a thing in the ordinary sense pass to a living individual. It could be proved in the case of a ‘material thing’ that its qualities are simply its ways of acting and reacting. The same is true of the outward qualities of the individual, and to a still more obvious degree of his inward qualities, which are in fact generalisations from his observed particular acts. We may therefore consider the individual merely as acting, and we see at once the two aspects separate and yet united in him. For on the one hand no particular act is the individual, nor any number, nor, supposing we could exhaust them, the sum of all; just as in the case of the thing, the individual himself remains over and above his particular acts, a unity, a something we know not what, — that which acts. Yet the individual is known, and moreover is, only through and in his acts. He is not a being apart, to whom the acts are attached as beads to a string. If we knew every particular act of the individual, from the beginning to the end, then, granted the unity of these acts, we should know the individual absolutely. Thus the individual apart from his acts, the acts apart from the individual, are alike abstractions, — necessary abstractions for the sake of knowledge, but still neither giving the truth, each only an aspect of the truth. Both these aspects are necessary for a knowledge of the whole. It is true they seem to leave nothing but contradiction in our knowledge, but just this contradiction is true of the real, that it is these two things at once, — a unity and a variety.

The application to the whole of reality, to the Absolute in itself and the succession of events, is easily made. Neither with the unity of the All, nor with its discrete parts can we dispense, — and the unity is not a merely formal one, but a living reality, the real subject to which all events in the universe are to be referred as its acts. It is true the notion ‘event,’ as we have seen, may require to be changed, or to be improved, for not everything that we call an event is to be regarded as an act of the Absolute; on the contrary, each act of the Absolute must find expression in an indefinite number of simultaneous ‘events’; this is demanded by the causal connection of things in the universe. Thus we have two inseparable aspects under which the universe is to be regarded, — on the one hand as God, the Absolute, “exalted above all Time-process,” eternal and unchangeable, the unity, the harmony of all things, absolutely unknowable as ‘in himself,’ or only to be determined by negation: — on the other hand the so-called phenomenal universe, the world of finite things, individuals, where all changes, all is in process, where also no fixed knowledge seems possible, for that which we seek to know changes under our hands, where content succeeds content, sometimes in apparent order, sometimes chaotic. It is only by uniting the two aspects that the