Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/378

Rh accomplished. The accomplishment of your purpose now means that your experience is viewed by you as the present and conscious expression of a plan. Well, what is, precisely in so far as it is, is in the same way a whole experience finally expressing and consciously fulfilling a plan. And the Being of the real object of which you now think means a life that expresses the fulfilment of just your present plan, in the greatest measure in which your plan itself is logically capable of fulfilment.

Into this categorical assertion of a concrete experience embodying a plan, our whole series of hypothetically valid assertions of the realm of Critical Rationalism have now resolved themselves. A will concretely embodied in a life, — and these meanings identical with the very purposes that our poor fleeting finite ideas are even now so fragmentarily seeking, amidst all their flickerings and their conflicts, to express, — this, I say, is the reality. This alone is. All else is either shadow, or else is partial embodiment, i.e. is a striving after that ideal which needs for its own expression this very striving. This alone is real, — this complete life of divine fulfilment of whatever finite ideas seek. It is because the finite idea essentially seeks its Other, so long as it remains indeterminate, that the quest can be attained only when the will of the idea is so embodied that no other embodiment is to be sought. It is because no quest can be defined as a quest without defining valid possible experiences such as would fulfil or defeat this quest, and it is because no such valid possible experiences can be defined without presupposing