Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/166

Rh immediate fact. But a fact not satisfying, is not a pure fact. For, as you will here maintain, a fact not wholly immediate, — by reason of the very dissatisfaction mingled with it, — sends you elsewhere for a presentation that you do not possess, and thus declares itself not yet the real. In none of these ways, then, will you allow yourself to be distracted from your goal by the objectors.

And finally, if your critic asks, why then, since you believe in no variety of experiences or points of view as genuinely real, you still argue with your critics as if they were real, disagree with other points of view as if they existed, thoughtfully maintain your own case as if thoughts were valuable aids, and confess your own experiences as if you, too, the private finite self, were a fact in a genuine world, then for this objection also you are prepared. For you will now insist that while you know what true Being in general is, you have not yet won the presence of it, so that, like any other imperfect finite thinker, you are struggling with illusions. You yourself, as finite person, your critic as another, your ideas and glimpses as various seeming facts, — these are all alike illusions. You confess this. You lament it. You could be bounded in a nutshell and count yourself king of infinite space, were it not that you have just these bad dreams of ordinary error and finitude. Of the true seer, who should go home to the Immediate Presence, one could say, with Shelley: —


 * “Peace, peace, he is not dead, he doth not sleep.
 * He hath awakened from the dream of life.
 * ’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions keep
 * With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
 * And in mad trance strike with our spirit’s knife
 * Invulnerable nothings.”