Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/56

Rh ignorance of the supposed Absolute Reality, what it is that he desires as his unattainable goal, when he thus laments. You cannot rationally say “I lack,” without being properly called upon to define, in some intelligible terms, what you suppose yourself to be lacking. And I know not how the present question can be answered, unless thus: That which man now lacks, in so far as he is ignorant of the Absolute Reality, is logically definable as a possible, but to us unattainable, sort of experience; namely, precisely an experience of what reality is. And I lay stress upon this view, in order simply to point out that our ignorance of reality cannot mean an ignorance of some object that we can conceive as existing apart from any possible experience or knowledge of what it is. What you and I lack, when we lament our human ignorance, is simply a certain desirable and logically possible state of mind, or type of experience; to wit, a state of mind in which we should wisely be able to say that we had fulfilled in experience what we now have merely in idea, namely, the knowledge, the immediate and felt presence, of what we now call the Absolute Reality.

Let us remember, then, this first simple insight: That our ignorance of the Absolute Reality can mean only that there is some sort of possible experience, some state of mind, that you and I want, but that we do not now possess. And next let us proceed to ask why it is that the foregoing popular argument for our human ignorance has seemed to us so convincing, — as it usually does seem. Why is it that when men say: “You are confined to your sensations, and your