Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/238

Rh ual object, the better is one’s general power of vision. “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister.” In general, attention, in one aspect of its significance, is an ignoring of possible experiences for the sake of fulfilling, in sharply differentiated individual experiences, ideas that could not be fulfilled except through the ignoring of such possibilities. Attention is thus sacrifice of ideal possibilities for the sake of realising ideas. It is losing to win — losing bare abstractions to find concrete life. But the concrete life found is a life full of contrasting individuals, of sharply differentiated fact, of discrete realities.

To the Absolute Experience, then, we should attribute just such a generalised form of the process that in us appears, clouded by countless psychological accidents, as the process of attention; just such an individuation of its contents, just such an attentive precision, whereby its universal types get discrete expression. Yet one comment is still needed in this connexion. This generalised form of attention, which we attribute to the Absolute Experience, is now conceived by us as that aspect of this Absolute which, in the total movement of the world’s unity, determines the ideas to find this concrete realisation which they do find. It follows, that, while the attentive process or aspect of this Whole Experience has to be conceived as fulfilling ideas, and so as counter to no idea, — and therefore as in this aspect absolutely rational, — on the other hand, this attentive aspect cannot be conceived as determined by any of the ideas, or by the thought-aspect of the Absolute in its wholeness, or as necessitated by thought, to attend