Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/237

200 construct are a few only of the infinitely infinite series of abstractly possible points. Your idea of these possible points transcends any actual series. Yet the actually constructed series of points (1) exemplifies or embodies the nature common to all the abstractly possible points, and (2) furnishes to your experience a discrete series of points, between which other points would be possible in idea, while in concrete fact they are not experienced. Now an Absolute Experience of the points on the line could in the end do nothing but exemplify, on some level, just this same process of experience.

So, then, an Absolute Experience could and would at once find its ideas adequately fulfilled in concrete fact, and also find this fulfilment as an individual collection of individuals exemplifying these ideas, while, as to other abstractly possible fulfilments of the same ideas, the Absolute Experience would find them as hypothetical or ideal entities, contrary to fact.

But to say this is to attribute to the Absolute Experience a character apparently identical in essence, not with the psychological accidents of our volitional experience, or even of our attention, but with one of the aspects that make our attention rationally significant. To attend involves, apart from the psychological accidents of the process, this rationally significant act, viz., the act of finding a universal type, or idea, exemplified by a datum of experience, while other possible data, that might exemplify this general type, are, relatively speaking, ignored. The idea of seeing is exemplified in seeing this object at the centre of the field of vision. The better one sees this individ-