Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/288

272 more complex subjects the inconceivability of the opposite remains rather the ideal to which our knowledge approximates. The more thoroughly we understand anything, the more we see that it must be so and not otherwise. To the savage or the child anything may happen, anything may account for anything: to the scientific mind the world appears more and more as a necessary system of thought-relations, "a materialized logical process," as Professor Huxley has described the course of nature.

But, I may be reminded, "a materialized logical process " implies a difference between thought and existence. "What things are," it will be said, "is one thing; what we may think about them is another, and so is what we may say about them. No one, at least no careful person, would confuse what we say about things with the real existence of them. Why should you confuse what we think about them with their real existence?"

Now what we, i.e. any particular "we," may happen to think about them is certainly not their reality. Their reality is what we ought to think about them and would think about them if we knew them completely. That is a big "if"; for to know any one thing, the "flower in the crannied wall," or even a mere atom completely, would be to know everything. And, if we think out the conception of omniscience, we shall find that it is identical with omnipotence. The will of God cannot be separated from the intellect of God without making God cease to be God and become a finite, imperfect being with things to be learned and ends to be attained outside his own nature. The thoughts of God are the ultimate nature of things, as Kepler recognized when he said he was "thinking the thoughts of God after him." The identity of thought and being does not imply the identity of any particular thought with any particular thing; e.g. that my idea of one hundred dollars is one hundred dollars, but only that the ultimate reality of things is only to be found in thought. Even the reality of the one hundred dollars consists not in their merely being space-occupying things, but in their meaning, their significance for the thought of more than one human being; i.e. their reality is their ideality.