Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/79

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Let us sum up, in a few words, our whole argument. There is, for us as we are, experience. Our thought undertakes the interpretation of this experience. Every intelligent interpretation of an experience involves, however, the appeal from this experienced fragment to some more organised whole of experience, in whose unity this fragment is conceived as finding its organic place. To talk of any reality which this fragmentary experience indicates, is to conceive this reality as the content of the more organised experience. To assert that there is any absolutely real fact indicated by our experience, is to regard this reality as presented to an absolutely organised experience, in which every fragment finds its place.

So far, indeed, in speaking of reality and an absolute experience, one talks of mere conceptual objects, — one deals, as the mathematical sciences do, with what appear to be only shadowy Platonic ideas. The question arises: Do these Platonic ideas of the absolute reality, and of the absolutely organised experience, stand for anything but merely ideal or possible entities? The right answer to this question comes, if one first assumes, for argument’s sake, that such answer is negative, and that there is no organised, but only a fragmentary experience. For then one has to define the alternative that is to be opposed to