Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/78

Rh in fact, just in so far as the reality is absolute, an absolute experience — for which this reality exists. To assert a truth as more than possible is to assert the concrete reality of an experience that knows this truth. Hence, — and here, indeed, is the conclusion of the whole matter, — the very effort hypothetically to assert that the whole world of experience is a world of fragmentary and finite experience is an effort involving a contradiction. Experience must constitute, in its entirety, one self-determined and consequently absolute and organised whole.

Otherwise put: All concrete or genuine, and not barely possible truth is, as such, a truth somewhere experienced. This is the inevitable result of the view with which we started when we said that without experience there is no knowledge. For truth is, so far as it is known. Now, this proposition applies as well to the totality of the world of finite experience as it does to the parts of that world. There must, then, be an experience to which is present the constitution (i.e. the actual limitation and narrowness) of all finite experience, just as surely as there is such a constitution. That there is nothing at all beyond this limited constitution must, as a fact, be present to this final experience. But this fact that the world of finite experience has no experience beyond it could not be present, as a fact, to any but an absolute experience which knew all that is or that genuinely can be known; and the proposition that a totality of finite experience could exist without there being any absolute experience, thus proves to be simply self-contradictory.