Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/77

40 ence that aims at the absolute experience when there is no absolute experience at which to aim, — this absolute finiteness and erroneousness of the real experience, I say, will itself be a fact, a truth, a reality, and, as such, just the absolute truth. But this supposed ultimate truth will exist for whose experience? For the finite experience? No, for although our finite experience knows itself to be limited, still, just in so far as it is finite, it cannot know that there is no unity beyond its fragmentariness. For if any experience actually knew (that is, actually experienced) itself to be the whole of experience, it would have to experience how and why it were so. And if it knew this, it would be ipso facto an absolute, i.e. a completely self-possessed, experience, for which there was no truth that was not, as such, a datum, — no ideal of a beyond that was not, as such, judged by the facts to be meaningless, — no thought to which a presentation did not correspond, no presentation whose reality was not luminous to its comprehending thought. Only such an absolute experience could say with assurance: “Beyond my world there is no further experience actual.” But if, by hypothesis, there is to be no such an experience, but only a limited collection of finite experiences, the question returns: The reality of this final limitation, the existence of no experience beyond the broken mass of finite fragments, — this is to be a truth, — but for whose experience is it to be a truth? Plainly, in the supposed case, it will be a truth nowhere presented — a truth for nobody. But, as we saw before, to assert any absolute reality as real is simply to assert an experience — and,