Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/207

170 for that very reason, that all fact, as such, has to be present to an Absolute Experience, Professor Howison’s ethical enthusiasm is logically defenceless. I agree that Individuality is a fact. I agree that it is an ethical fact. I agree that the fact of other individuality than mine is to me, in my private capacity, something transcendent. But such transcendence has many other examples, doubtless not so important, but nevertheless logically instructive. What happened last year, now has a reality which entirely transcends any moment of present experience, — inaccessibly transcends it, so that one in vain tries to state the true essence of the real past by converting it into mere present possibilities of experience; as, for example, by saying that the past means that if I were back there now, I should experience so and so. Such possibilities of experience do not express what the past as such is, and always henceforth will be, namely, essentially irrevocable. Even so, no attempt to transmute my neighbour’s real inner life into possibilities of my own experience is or can be successful, in so far as I am taken in my own finite and individual selfhood. But just as past and present, from an idealistic point of view, are fragments of the eternal Now, — of the Absolute Experience, — so the fact of the relative finite isolation of individuals is a real fact in so far as the Absolute Experience finds it to be such. What the source and ultimate nature of Individuality is, and whether the whole truth of Individuality is well expressed by calling it merely a fact present in the content of the Absolute Experience, is a question to be later considered. I agree with