Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/387

368 press, has its correspondent decision, yes or no, in the facts of the truly real empirical world, then the fulfilment of the ideas about experience in the facts of experience to which they refer, is once for all a wholly determinate fulfilment. And in this case, whatever constitution the world of experience in its entirety possesses, is as such an individual and final constitution.

And so, we say, the empirical world is a whole, a life fulfilling the purposes of our ideas. It is that or it is nothing. You labor in vain. The net of truth enmeshes your doubts.

“And yet,” as you may now interpose, “we have but just seen that no man experiences, for himself, at any moment, this final constitution of our realm of experience.” Of course no man experiences that constitution. Now we see through a glass darkly. It is not yet revealed what we shall be. It is not yet known to us what our own whole experience itself in its details contains. But we know that it is. And we observe the constitution of that realm. It is through and through a constitution that answers our questions, embodies our meanings, integrates our purposes. It is then in essence a realm of fact fulfilling purpose, of life embodying idea, of meaning won by means of the experience of its own content. The now present but passing form of our human consciousness is fragmentary. We wait, wonder, pass from fact to fact, from fragment to fragment. What a study of the concept of Being reveals to us is precisely that the whole has a meaning, and is real only as a Meaning Embodied.