Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/378

Rh the “principles” which would be “indispensable” to one who either undertook to follow common-sense or to correct common-sense in all its daily dealings with “any and every individual fact not directly observed,” would far transcend the ken of any philosopher. But, of course, as to the first of these statements of Professor Mezes, namely, the statement that philosophy is not concerned “to prove the existence of individual facts,” as such, there will be no question. The two statements, however, raise a problem as to the sense in which a philosophy such as mine, in defining the life of the Absolute, has first to deal, either in “principle” or in detail, with the individual existence of this or of that finite fact. And the problem here deserves still a word of answer.

Any one of us, as individual, believes in many finite facts that are needed to give his life any meaning, and that lie, as such facts, beyond the range of his private experience. Now comes philosophy, and says: The world as a whole has meaning; the Absolute sees all valid ideas fulfilled. The finite individual retorts with his questions: “But is this absolute meaning my meaning, or is it so inclusive of my meaning that my ideas of finite objects, say, of my wife and children, of my neighbours, of human life in general, of the higher and lower in the spiritual realm, are sure, in certain definable types of cases, to represent finite facts beyond my private experience? Am I insured against finite illusions by the organisation of the Absolute? Or can the Absolute so fulfil its own system of ideas as merely to refute or to neglect or to defeat my ideas? Can my life be a dream and