Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/105

86 lutely no real difference to God, who was just as complete before he created it as afterwards. And God’s perfection is, for himself, a perfectly immediate fact.

So much, then, for a preliminary glance at the meaning of the mystical conception of reality.

And thus, after a discussion, at the outset of the present lecture, of the general nature of the ontological predicate, we have proceeded, first, to sketch three different meanings that the popular use of language seems to have especially had in mind in asserting that any object is real. We have seen, of course, that these three meanings were fragmentary, and more or less conflicting. We have turned from popular usage to study the more elaborate efforts of the philosophers to purify or to harmonize the ontological concepts. Of the four resulting forms of the ontological predicate which, as we asserted, are prominent in the history of philosophy, we have now briefly outlined two. As a result, we have before us definitions of Being which are the polar opposites of each other. These are the realistic and the mystical definitions. Realism defines Real Being as a total Independence of any idea whose external object any given Being is. Mysticism defines Real Being as wholly within Immediate Feeling. These two concepts, both of them, as I must hold, false abstractions, are still both of them fragmentary views, as I also hold, of the truth, — hints towards a final definition of the Other, of that fulfilment which our finite thinking restlessly seeks. But any fair criticism of either of the two conceptions so far before us, demands a separate lecture; and the third and fourth conceptions of Real Being will be considered only after these two have first been examined.