Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/80

Rh the supposedly erroneous conception of an absolute experience. That alternative, as pointed out, is a world of fragmentary experiences, whose limited nature is not determined by any all-pervading idea. Such a world of finite experiences is to be merely what it happens to be, — is to contain only what chances here or there to be felt. But hereupon arises the question: What reality has this fact of the limitation and fragmentariness of the actual world of experiences? If every reality has to exist just in so far as there is experience of its existence, then the determination of the world of experience to be this world and no other, the fact that reality contains no other facts than these, is, as the supposed final reality, itself the object of one experience, for which the fragmentariness of the finite world appears as a presented and absolute fact, beyond which no reality is to be viewed as even genuinely possible. For this final experience, the conception of any possible experience beyond is known as an ungrounded conception, as an actual impossibility. But so, this final experience is by hypothesis forthwith defined as One, as all-inclusive, as determined by nothing beyond itself, as assured of the complete fulfilment of its own ideas concerning what is, — in brief, it becomes an absolute experience. The very effort to deny an absolute experience involves, then, the actual assertion of such an absolute experience.

Our result, then, is: There is an Absolute Experience, for which the conception of an absolute reality, i.e. the conception of a system of ideal truth, is fulfilled by the very contents that get presented to this Ex-