Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/318

Rh is all the while our goal, if our universal judgments were confirmed by an adequate experience, not of some object (still indeterminate), but of the individual object, or of all the individual objects, so that no other empirical expression of our ideas remained possible, then, indeed, we should stand in the immediate presence of the Real. The Real, then, is, from this point of view, that which is immediately beyond the whole of our series of possible efforts to bring, by any process of finite experience and of merely general conception, our own internal meaning to a complete determination.

Abstract as this result is, it is already of great significance. It shows us what the Third Conception lacks, namely, a view of the Real as the finally determinate that permits no other. It also shows that the mere sundering of external and internal meanings is somehow faulty. Their linkage is the deepest fact about the universe.

And thus the first of the two closing stages of our journey is done. We have learned how the internal meaning is related to its own Limit, in so far as that is just a limit. But thus to view Being is still not to take account of what seems to common sense the most important of all our relations to the Real. And that is the relation of Correspondence, — several times heretofore mentioned, but not yet fathomed. “We must not only seek Being as our goal, but we must correspond to its real constitution if we are to get the truth. And somehow it has that constitution. We have to submit. The Real may not be wholly independent of our thinking, but it is at least authoritative.” So common sense states the case. But that aspect of the matter, as I repeat, we have not yet