Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/67

30 with the conceived object of an ideal organised experience — an object conceived to be present to that experience as directly as your sensory experiences are present to you.

In the light of such considerations, our notion of the infinitely remote goal of human knowledge gets a transformation of a sort very familiar to all students of philosophical Idealism. And this transformation relates to two aspects of our conception of knowledge, viz.: first, to our notion of what reality is, and secondly to our notion of what we mean by that Organised Experience. In the first place, the reality that we seek to know has always to be defined as that which either is or would be present to a sort of experience which we ideally define as an organised — that is, a united and transparently reasonable — experience. We have, in point of fact, no conception of reality capable of definition except this one. In case of an ordinary illusion of the senses we often say: This object seems thus or so; but in reality it is thus. Now, here the seeming is opposed to the reality only in so far as the chance experience of one point of view gets contrasted with what would be, or might be, experienced from some larger, more rationally permanent, or more inclusive and uniting point of view. Just so, the temperature of the room seems