Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/360

Rh (3) an individual life for which no other can be substituted.

Now in defining this complete life, in which alone the finite idea, as a passing thrill of conscious meaning, can find the genuine object that it means fully embodied, we have so far still used many expressions derived from the conception of mere validity. We have spoken of what this life would be if it were completely present. But, having used these forms of expression as mere scaffolding, at the close we must indeed observe afresh that all validity, as an incomplete universal conception, needs another, to give it final meaning. If there is validity, there is then an object more than merely valid which gives the very conception of validity its own meaning. All that we learned before. It was that very defect of the third conception which sent us looking for the sense in which there can be an object of any idea.

We have now defined what this object is. It is an individual life, present as a whole, totum simul, as the scholastics would have said. This life is at once a system of facts, and the fulfilment of whatever purpose any finite idea, in so far as it is true to its own meaning, already fragmentarily embodies. This life is the completed will, as well as the completed experience, corresponding to the will and experience of any one finite idea. In its wholeness the world of Being is the world of individually expressed meanings, — an individual life, consisting of the individual embodiments of the wills represented by all finite ideas. Now to be, in the final sense, means to be just such a life, complete, present to experience, and conclusive of the search for perfection which every finite idea