Page:Synthetica, Volume 1 (1906).djvu/87

76 There can in that case be no explanation, which is not illusory, of the individuality of atom or man. For individuality lies in the resistance to a universal movement, and the negation of the One of Being is the form of individuality generally. A One which is conceived as the "Many" and a process in the Many cancels the individuality of things; nay, it would appear to cancel also its own Sole Oneness by being converted into an aggregate of particulars.

The world of our experience, then, is given to sentience as a beënt negation in the modes of quantity, motion, quality, degree, and so forth. It is a Realitas-phenomenon just as it lies there before us in this our own sphere of the universal and divine movement.

It would appear that we have only been putting into words a very simple position: we have been using the term "phenomenon" in its ordinary and popular sense; for the word contains in it the thought of shapes and forms as the "appearance" of that which has neither shape nor form. It is a beënt appearance—and therefore Reality. That sunset is the manner of the Divine existence on this man-plane of Universal Being, and yet it contains the negation of that Being; and I, a man, see it as it veritably is on this plane.

Although in the metaphysical account of "matter" we seem to have saved ourselves from Pantheism, the position is not wholly satisfactory; for negation and phenomenon might be the mere emanation—flux and reflux of Absolute Being. If the world be an emanation from Absolute Being as Monistic Pantheism would have it, Absolute Being is as things, and not merely in things that have a quasi-independence. And so far as