Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/241

204 the highest expression of truth in terms of thought is inevitably the categorical judgment rather than the hypothetical, the assertory judgment rather than the apodictic. For that very reason all assertions such as “A requires for its explanation, or for its cause, something else, namely, B,” must be subordinate to the ultimate assertion, “The whole world of given fact is.” When, in the first section of this paper, we interpreted the implications of finite experience, and found that, in order to avoid contradiction, all finite experience must be regarded as a fragment of a whole, whose content is present in the unity of consciousness of one absolute moment, — in all this we did not assert that the contents of finite experience need an external cause, or that the Absolute is the cause of the relative. We declared that the Absolute is the whole system of which the finite experience is a moment or a fragment. Therefore, our Absolute in no sense explains the world as a cause, but possesses the world of fact, precisely as fact. In this sense, the constitution of reality is indeed, from the absolute point of view, something that, despite all the mediations, the relationships, the dependencies present in the world, is in its wholeness immediate — a datum, underived from anything external to itself. In this sense, then, we are not arguing that the Absolute must will, but only that it does will. For it is, and its being includes Will.

In general, it is characteristic of the idealistic point of view, first, that you are able to say of any finite fragment of experience, that, in order to be fact, it must stand in a certain more or less definable relation