Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/232

Rh experience all the consequences that would have followed had the Persians won at Marathon, or had the Turks overrun Europe. Endless would be the enumerations of even the possible types of possibility that thought would seem to be capable of presenting to an experience which undertook the task of tracing out every infinite regress, every chasing of an ideal limit, every altering of a variable of experience such as thought can declare to be possible. No, surely, there can be no concrete experiences capable of exhausting thought’s possibilities.

On the contrary, however, one may indeed argue, as we have already done, that a true thought, even about a bare possibility, is simply an expression, in thought’s terms, of something which, just so far as it is true, must be somewhere presented to a concrete experience. This result is in fact inevitable unless, indeed, one is prepared to abandon the fundamental propositions: (1) that experience is an eternally real aspect of truth, and the highest court of appeal when ideas seek for facts, and (2) the accompanying proposition, that whatever is, is somewhere presented.

Here, then, are two views of the relation of thought to experience in the unity of a World-Experience. Are they reconcilable? The one asserts that a World-Experience, since it would inevitably think of possibilities that were not realised in its presentations, would transcend its own content by virtue of its own ideas, and so would be, from an ideal point of view, a relatively incomplete experience. The other asserts that, since bare possibilities are as good as impossibilities, and since true thoughts are true because they