Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/214

Rh are naught, your Absolute is naught in precisely the same sense, and in precisely the same degree as the ideas and as the finite facts are naught. On the other hand, if your Absolute is real, then, unless it has a distinguishing positive content of its own, unless it is more than mere finality and peace, the finite world of conscious strivings after it, is precisely as real as itself, since your Absolute borrows all its Being from its contrast with those strivings. Precisely, then, as we dealt with the realist by pointing out that his ideas are at least as real as their supposed independent objects, so now we bring the mystic’s case to its close, by pointing out that his Absolute, in its abstraction, is precisely as much, and in exactly the same sense of the terms a Nothing, as, by his hypothesis, his own consciousness is.

And herewith we indeed abandon the abstractions of both Realism and Mysticism. What we have learned from those abstractions is that our finite consciousness indeed seeks a meaning that it does not now find presented. We have learned too that this meaning is neither a merely independent Being, nor a merely immediate Datum. What else can it be?

Our answer to this question depends upon an effort to amend the extreme statement of Realism. I suppose that no realist, when once confronted with the consequences of the absolute mutual independence of the Real and of the Idea that from without refers to it, will be disposed to admit that he ever really meant