Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/246

Rh Experience, and exhaustively definable, in all their relations, by one constructive process, which, if you knew it, would enable you from any one to construct all the rest. It is to such a system, and to its interrelationships, that the conception of “necessity” primarily applies. Plato first conceived of such a system of ideally definable contents, although his Ideas are not identical with those of the modern idealist. Hegel’s Logic was an effort to define just such an absolute Group of ideas, a closed circle of categories, although the effort indeed was imperfect enough. The idealist's thesis is that such an absolute Group is definable, and, from the absolute point of view, is defined.

On the other hand, our thesis maintains that the Absolute Experience, viewed in its wholeness, fulfils this System, or Group, of ideas. This fulfilment, as we have said, is for the Absolute immediate fact. We define this fact, to be sure, in terms of our necessity. Our necessity means merely that we must be consistent, else we shall have asserted nothing. But the whole experience of the Absolute, in its wholeness, is above that necessity. And our proof, once more, goes back to that brute finite experience: “Something is real.” Yet, to use once more the inevitable formula of our finite thinking, we must assert that the Absolute Experience has such constitution as is implied in its fulfilment of the system of ideas. Hence the Absolute Experience, so we assert, is no chaos. Since perfection, worth, significance, fulness of life, organisation, are ideas, the Absolute Experience must present, that is, must be asserted by us as presenting, or, viewed in itself, simply