Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/233

196 express the nature of something that experience realises, and since even a possibility, if it is genuine, must be represented in experience, an Absolute Experience would have concretely to fulfil all possibilities whose essence was not illusory. Here is a new antinomy in our concept of the Absolute. How shall we deal with it? The actual reconciliation of these two abstractly opposed points of view is rendered easier by the fact that our experience already, in its measure, exemplifies their reconciliation. And first, here, let us note that a truth manifest in experience can often have its very essence expressed by a hypothetical judgment whose hypothesis is contrary to the fact expressed. “If wishes were horses, beggars might ride.” This is not an idle speculation, but a quaint expression, in relatively abstract terms, of the experienced fact that to desire a horse is one thing, to have a horse is quite another. Two facts of experience, m and n, stand before us in sharp contrast. We want to express the contrast. But the facts, as given, are complex. We analyse their structure, and thoughtfully discover that while m contains the elements p and q, n contains the related but contrasting elements p' and q'. We also observe that p and q, p' and q', are couples, whose respective members are closely linked by some law. We express our discovery by the hypothetical proposition that if p, in m, were transformed into p', then of necessity q would be transformed into q' and our experience would contain not the contrast between m and n, but a pair of n’s, very much alike. The hypothesis is contrary to fact; but the nature of the