Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/168

Rh sistency of his definition, and its adequacy to express the constitution of our search for truth.

In a general statement, this definition is now once more before you. Viewed as to its logical relations with its rival, the position of Mysticism should prove, from this starting point, readily comprehensible. You may remember our former sketch of the finite situation that sends us all alike looking for true Being. Data of experience, present facts, are on our hands, — colors, sounds, pains, passions. These are so far relatively immediate; in psychology we call them masses of sensation or of feeling; they are in general not wholly satisfactory, usually perplexing, often very tragic. The mystic would insist that for this very reason they are not wholly immediate. In our more clearly conscious moments they constantly stimulate us to think and to act. On the other hand, we have our ideas. These too are, in one aspect, masses of relatively immediate data; for they are present; the psychologists would find their mere contents, in general, to be of an obviously sensory type; they come and go in their own way. But then, the ideas too are explicitly and obviously facts that are not merely immediate. They are contents of thought as well as masses of feeling; and the peculiar way in which they are more than immediate is what makes them worthy to be called ideas. And as contents of thought, as ideas, they already present to us, however incompletely, that relative fulfilment of purpose, that partial embodiment of meaning, which sets them in contrast to those brute facts of the lower forms of immediacy, those meaningless accidents of sensation,