Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/336

 immediate, and, on the other hand, not merely inclusive of whatever mediate and interrelated contents there are in the world; but it is also a unity of consciousness determined by its reference to the whole process that we express in finite mediations. The Absolute Experience knows — or, if you please to use the familiar metaphor, sees — the perfect fulfilment of the absolute system of thought or ideas. This fulfilment, first of all, constitutes what the Absolute as such sees, and, save by seeing this, the Absolute is no Absolute, no Experience, no seeing of truth, at all. Now this seeing, this consciousness, of ideas — of the truth — as fulfilled in the immediate data or contents of the Absolute Experience, is a seeing of a contrast, namely, of the contrast between the world of thought (itself a fashion of consciousness) and the world of facts, or data. Now these two aspects of the Absolute are seen as contrasted and yet as essentially related fashions of consciousness, contrasted as a thinking Self and a Self experiencing data. The Absolute sees these as fulfilling the one the other; since the thought, without the data, would be empty, the data, except in view of the thought, would be meaningless. Moreover, the thought, even in thinking of the data, essentially thinks of its own fulfilment, and so of the conscious aspect that beholds the fulfilment; so that the Absolute as the Seer of thought fulfilled, and the Absolute as the Thinker whose ideas refer to and aim at this very seeing or insight itself, together again constitute two conscious and contrasted aspects of the Absolute Unity, the Thinker and the Seer, as we might metaphorically