Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/214

Rh arguments is more adapted for an immediate transformation into the form, not of the half-idealism above considered, but of the Absolute Idealism maintained in my original paper, and in the immediately previous section of the present argument. The situation is this: Moments or persons, experiences or thoughts, themselves numerically different, can refer to and mean the same object external to them all. Now, wherein consists this sameness of reference? Is it conceivably a fact that can transcend all experience? By hypothesis it does transcend our experience, as such. But is ours all? The moments in question have, in themselves, by hypothesis, only a fragment of a meaning present to them. The rest of this meaning, and (be it noted) of their own meaning, is beyond them. But a meaning, as the meaning of a thought referring to an object, is a sort of fact that, by definition, can have no meaning, cannot be this sort of fact, except for consciousness, i.e. except when it is experienced as a meaning. A fact supposed to be transcendent to all consciousness might well be an x but could not well be that unique and definite relationship which is presented to us whenever the meaning, or objective reference of our thoughts, is not fragmentary, but is, relatively speaking, within our own range of experience. Moments, or persons, or thoughts, a, b, and c, mean, let us say, — that is, refer to, — the same object O. That is, in nature, a perfectly obvious kind of relation. For if a, b, and c are present with the object O as moments or factors in the same whole unity of consciousness, then indeed we are aware what the relation is. In our own experience we are sufficiently