Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/300

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For what happens with the child crying over the toy, happens over and over again in our life. A is presented. So far, one has fact and type. Here, apart from relations to other presupposed individuals, knowledge, as purely theoretical, — knowledge, whether as sense or as thought, — finds only types, qualities, forms, universals; vague or exact, brutally immediate or scientifically computed and verified. B might come, after A or contemporaneously with it, and might show, either just the same contents as were noticed in A, or else contents contrasting with those of A only in universally significant respects, such as position. So far, then, A and B can agree or can differ, — but only as types, as universals. But now let A be loved, or, if you will, hated (since hate is, as Browning has it, a “mask of love”), — but loved or hated with the peculiar sort of exclusive passion that marks some of our deeper instincts, and that, in very diluted form, still colours many even of our gentler and more contemplative concerns. With such exclusive interests one learns to love each of one’s more permanent possessions, — one’s home, books, trinkets; one’s children, and all the other members of one’s family; one’s country, business, life; the mass of contents and relations designated as one’s self, and the other masses known as each of one’s friends. With gentler, but still relatively exclusive interests, one recognises places revisited, complex objects of scientific interest once carefully studied; and so on, indefinitely. Well, A is present and arouses such a consciously exclusive interest. Could there be another object B so similar to A as