Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/236

Rh always transcend content, even in an Absolute Experience? Yes, as abstract or unreal ideas, for the reason before pointed out. No actual experience could adequately fulfil, or present contents adequately expressing, the infinite regresses, the infinitely infinite groups of possible examples of every universal, whose abstract possibility a merely abstract thought demands. Ideas, then, must indeed in one sense transcend data even in an Absolute Experience. But how? Answer: As hypotheses contrary to fact, not as expressions of genuine and unfulfilled truth. But what sort of Absolute Experience would that be, in which there were ideas present as hypotheses contrary to fact, as bare or unreal possibilities?

I answer, it would be an experience of fact as individual cases, exemplifying universal types in such a fashion as to embody a knowledge of the essence both of these facts and of their types. So far, it would then be an experience of a concrete and individual fulfilment of all genuine ideas. On the other hand, this fulfilment would embody universals, not in all abstractly or barely possible cases, — since that would be, concretely speaking, impossible, — but in contents sharply differentiated from one another, and thereby preserved from lapsing into the bare continuity which would link together the series of abstractly possible contents such as could be defined through mere ideas. To exemplify: You know the nature of a geometrical line only when you know that it does contain series of points. This you can only concretely know in so far as you construct actual points on the line. But the points that you actually