Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/215

178 accustomed to such cases. Thus, for example, in one conscious moment I may observe two thoughts of mine referring to the same object; as when, in logic, I compare two judgments, or, in a considerate mood, balance two opinions relating to the same subject-matter. What the relation that thus constitutes the common meaning of two thoughts is, I in such cases directly observe. But, now, how could such a relation exist, unobserved by any consciousness, and forming no content of any experience? Here surely, if anywhere, is a sort of fact whose esse is percipi, whose nature it is to be known. If it is the universal presupposition of rationality that just such a relation may, and in practice constantly does, bind many moments in my own flowing experience to the same object, not presented in any one of those moments, then the only way in which this relation can be interpreted is to suppose that all these moments are really fragments of one Unity of Consciousness, of a Unity not bound to the limitations of our own flow of successive and numerically separate experiences, although inclusive, both of this flow, and of these various experiences themselves, — in their very fragmentariness, — but also in their relationships.

It is indeed common enough for the realist to conceive his transcendent objects as remaining the same objects through a long series of moments of time. Time flows, and they, he says, persist as the same “things in themselves.” This view is indeed, in any of its forms, a hopeless abstraction so long as the objects are mere “things in themselves.” But its abstractness becomes peculiarly manifest when this