Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/230

Rh

Our finite experience, as it comes, is theoretically incomplete in two senses: (1) in that it does not contain the contents which would be needed to meet the ideas and ideal questions that it arouses in us; and (2) in that the contents which it already contains are not, in general, sufficiently clear to our judging thought. On the one side, then, in our experience the contents are not enough to satisfy the ideas which they actually arouse, and we ask: What else is needed in order to complete this collection of contents? On the other side, our ideas are not yet adequate to the present contents, and we ask: What else is needed in order to give us a complete account of what is presented?

Now the World-Consciousness, which, in our foregoing account, we have defined as inevitably actual, cannot be incomplete in the second of these senses. For it experiences, so we have said, all that is real regarding its own contents; in other words, it must know its own contents through and through. Its ideas must be adequate to its presentations. But one may still ask: Is it not inevitably incomplete in the first sense? Must it not have ideas of possible contents that it does not possess? Must not its ideas go beyond its contents?

At a first glance, this would seem indeed logically inevitable. It is of the nature of pure or abstract thinking to deal with endless possibilities, with ideas