Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/37

18 total impression of its behavior. And so, this World of Fact daily announces itself to you as a defiant mystery — a mystery such as Job faced, and such as the latest agnostic summary of empirical results, in their bearing upon our largest human interests, or such as even the latest pessimistic novel will no doubt any day present afresh to you, in all the ancient unkindliness that belongs to human fortune.

The World as Fact is, then, for all of us, persistently baffling, unless we find somewhere else the key to it. The philosophers of the Platonic type have, however, long ago told us that this defect of our world of fact is due, at bottom, simply to the fault of our human type of consciousness. And hence a whole realm of philosophical inquiry has been devoted, in the best ages of speculative thinking, to a criticism of this human type of consciousness itself. Upon such a criticism, Plato founded his conception of the Ideal World. By such criticism, Plotinus sought to find the way upwards, through Soul to the realm of the Intellect, and beyond the Intellect to his Absolute “One.” Through a similar criticism, Scholastic doctrine attempted to purify our human type of consciousness, until it should reach the realm of genuine spirituality, and attain an insight but a little lower than that of the conceived angelic type of intelligence. For all such thinkers, the raising of our type of consciousness to some higher level meant not only the winning of insight into Reality, but also the attainment of an inner and distinctly religious ideal. To a later and less technically pious form of thinking, one sees the transition in Spinoza, who was at once, as we now know, a child of Scholasti-