Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/164

Rh given, satisfying, peaceful. If a realist, viewing your progress from without, observes hereupon that you are simply ignoring the manifold realities of the finite world, you reply that those so-called realities, just because they are many, and because they pretend to be independent beings, are illusory, and that in forsaking such a world, you simply spare yourself errors. As, in the world of the supposed independent beings, nothing is real, you care nothing for that world. If the realist, hearing that you seek something called Unity, reminds you that realists also may undertake to be monistic in their view of reality, you reply that, for reasons now sufficiently set forth in our own discussion, what is One can never be independent of the insight that knows it, and that therefore the only place to look for unity is within, at the heart of experience, not without and beyond where the realist looks for Being. If a worldly critic, wondering at your pretensions, asks you how you dare to assert that just you, in your loneliness, can ever win an immediate relation to the final truth of all the universe, can ever find God within your poor self, you reply that just in so far as you have approached the goal most nearly, you, the supposed finite thinker, the private individual, have simply ceased to be known, even to yourself, so that not your private self, but the Absolute, alone, will remain when the goal is reached. For your very discovery of that which is, would involve the forgetting of your finite personality as an illusion, an error, an evil dream.

If now a Protagorean sceptic, asserting that Man is the measure of all things, hereupon observes that indeed Realism was false, and that nothing is, except what is felt, at the