Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/186

Rh since in very truth there is only the Self, since the finite process of striving after the Self is wholly illusory, and the Self in its perfection is alone real, what now remains as the Absolute? Well, in the first place the true Self does not strive. It has no idea of any other. It has no positive will. Object and Subject are in it no longer even different. It has no character. There is the murderer no longer murderer, nor the slave a slave, nor the traitor a traitor. Differences are illusory. The Self merely is. But now is in what sense? Not as the independent Other, not as the object of a thought, not as describable in terms of an idea, not as expressible in any way, and still less as mere nothing. For it is the All, the only Being. There remains to hint what the being of the Self is only what we now call the immediacy of present experience. Only henceforth we must regard the absolute immediacy not as the raw material of meaning, but as the restful goal of all meaning, — as beyond ideas, even because it is simpler than they are. It is at once nothing independent of knowledge and nothing that admits of diversity within knowledge. The Self is precisely the very Knower, not as a thing that first is real and then knows, but as the very act of seeing, hearing, thinking, in so far as the mediating presence of some Other, of some object that is known, seen, heard, thought, is simply removed, and in so far as the very diversity of the acts of knowing, seeing, hearing, thinking, is also removed.

Most obvious about the Self, from our finite point of view, is its perfection as a fulfilment of our striving. For us to win oneness with the Self means to attain a