Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/247

210 does present, an organised, significant, purposeful or teleological, worthy, perfect whole of fact; and that, however much of ill, or imperfection, the finite world seems to contain when fragmentarily viewed. So far, we define, then, the Absolute Thought and Experience in their organic relationships, as, on the one hand, we must assert them to be, and, on the other hand, as, according to our thesis, they themselves are. Of the two, the Experience names the factor which at once, when viewed as whole, includes the thought-aspect of the world, while, so long as you view the thought-aspect abstractly, the Experience appears precisely as the aspect whereby the Thought gets fulfilled. The best expression, so far, might be: “The Absolute experiences that its system of Thought is fulfilled in and through the constitution of the data of its Experience,” — an assertion which makes explicit the self-conscious moment in our whole theory of the Absolute.

But if into this conception of the Absolute the new moment which we have called the Will is to be introduced, there must be some motive present to our thought besides the motives involved in our first deduction of the Absolute. The new motive has been furnished in the foregoing account by a very simple reflection upon what the Absolute, as defined, not merely must be, but, for our definition, and for itself, also immediately is. As defined, it is not merely perfect, significant, and the rest, but it is a Whole; its contents form one Moment. Its unity is the unity of a single Instant. It is that which, as such, neither requires nor permits a beyond.