Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/173

155 in the sense of maturity or ripeness is a purely relative term. Real perfection is the capacity and fact of life, of growth, of development, of evolution—not finality.

We all of us are continually having experiences which in a concrete and functional sense are absolute. This occurs whenever in any relatively satisfying activity we feel, for the time at least, that we have achieved something worth while. Any state of experience in which we feel that we have won a value that is relatively adequate, is, for that experience, absolute. Our search does result in finding, we do sometimes achieve our ends, get somewhere, accomplish something. To this extent and in this sense it may be said that we are of, with, to, for, in the Absolute. I work hard to earn a thousand dollars; and when I have it credited to me on my bank account I have a feeling of something attained, a goal won. This is the absolutism of realization. It may last but a moment, the end achieved being turned over into means to further ends; but while it lasts this feeling of accomplishment and achievement is an absolute experience. Derivation is only one way of viewing experience. We conceive of experience as a process which has a starting-point and a goal only when it is relatively inadequate. But in moments of satisfaction, in moments of relative absorption, in those moments which we may call absolute because they are relatively summative and consummative, the questions of origin and destiny become irrelevant, irrelevant because in such moments there is no discrepancy, no contradiction, no problem. Validity collapses into immediacy. Experience everywhere assumes these two aspects. On the one side, it is always summing itself up in definite interests which for the time being are absorbing. But while these are empirically ultimate and complete, they in turn cease to be ends in themselves and become means for finding something else. Infinity of space and time simply means that there is no experience which may not be put to a use beyond itself, there is no end which may not become means to a further end. The universe is infinite in the sense that everything we get is converted into capital for getting more. "Experience is for the sake of more experience."