Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/76

Rh it does not regard itself as suggesting truth, it concerns us not here. Enough, one who thinks, who aims at truth, who means to know anything, is regarding his experience as suggesting truth. Now, to regard our experience as suggesting truth is, as we have seen, to mean that our experience indicates what a higher or inclusive, i.e. a more organised, experience would find presented thus or thus to itself. It is this meaning, this intent, this aim, this will to find in the moment the indication of what a higher experience directly grasps, — it is this that embodies for us the fact of which our hypothetical proposition aforesaid is the expression. But you may here say: “This aim, this will, is all. As a fact, you and I aim at the absolute experience; that is what we mean by wanting to know absolute truth; but the absolute experience,” so you may insist, “is just a mere ideal. There need be no such experience as a concrete actuality. The aim, the intent, is the known fact. The rest is silence, — perhaps error. Perhaps there is no absolute truth, no ideally united and unfragmentary experience.”

But hereupon one turns upon you with the inevitable dialectic of our problem itself. Grant hypothetically, if you choose, for a moment, that there is no universal experience as a concrete fact, but only the hope of it, the definition of it, the will to win it, the groaning and travail of the whole of finite experience in the search for it, in the error of believing that it is. Well, what will that mean? This ultimate limitation, this finally imprisoned finitude, this absolute fragmentariness and error, of the actual experi-