Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/169

150 which, in our case, always accompany them. The ideas thus constitute the relatively significant aspect, the uncomprehended brute facts present the relatively meaningless aspect, of our ordinary and momentary conscious life. In two ways, however, is the resulting form of finite consciousness unsatisfactory: first, in so far as its finite meanings, even where as nearly present as we ever get them, are viewed by ourselves as incompletely present; and, secondly, in so far as the seemingly accidental sensations of the instant are relatively opposed to even so much of our meaning as is now in sight, so that our sensations tend, as we say, to confuse or to puzzle us. This doubly unsatisfactory form of our finite consciousness is an universal character with us men as we are. Never do all the current sensory experiences completely fuse with our ideas, so as simply to aid in developing the meaning of our inner life. Never do our passing meanings get at any instant presented to us, in their own adequate wholeness, even as so-called “mere” ideas. We mean more than we find. We find also data foreign to those that we mean.

The advantage of this way of stating the universal form of our finite human consciousness lies in the fact that this, our fashion of statement, here presupposes no abstract sundering of the Intellect from the Will, but that it shows the actual unity of theoretical and practical processes, and is as valid for the consciousness of a wanderer struggling to reach a mountain top, or to find his way home, as it is for the conscious life of a mathematician seeking to solve an equation, of a chemist waiting for the results of the experiment which he all