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46 as Selfhood eternally obtained. And all this the Absolute is in concrete unity, not in mere variety.

Yet our purpose here is not religious but speculative. It is not mine to-night to declare the glory of the Divine Being, but simply to scrutinise the definition of the Absolute. The heart of my whole argument, here as in my book, has been the insistence that all these seemingly so transcendent and imprudent speculations about the Absolute are, as a fact, the mere effort to express, as coherently as may be, the commonplace implications of our very human ignorance itself. People think it very modest to say: We cannot know what the Absolute Reality is. They forget that to make this assertion implies — unless one is using idle words without sense — that one knows what the term “Absolute Reality” means. People think it easy to say: We can be sure of only what our own finite experience presents. They forget that if a world of finite experience exists at all, this world must have a consistently definable constitution, in order that it may exist. Its constitution, however, turns out to be such that an Absolute Experience — namely, an experience acquainted with limitation only in so far as this limitation is determined by the organised and transparent constitution of this experience — is needed as that for which the fragmentary constitution of the finite world of experience exists. The very watchword, then, of our whole doctrine is this: All knowledge is of something experienced. For this means that nothing actually exists save what is somewhere experienced. If this be true, then the total limitation, the deter-