Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/397

378 not the very uncertainty of the time of death one of its ills for every prudent man? So much then for one aspect of the empirical ill called death. So far, to know its Being is relatively and imperfectly to fulfil ideas. And our theory defines its Being in terms of this fulfilment.

But death — and, above all, not our own death nearly so much as the death of our friends — is an evil in so far as it appears in our experience as a temporal defeat of the purposes of human love, and of the need of the human world for its good men. Well, this is the other, and, for our own theory, indeed, the more problematic aspect of death. For here the passing fragment of fact is that a given human purpose is so far defeated. And this fragment of fact, as we admit, is obviously somehow a part of the real, — a fact of finite Being. And yet our theory asserts that what is, as such, fulfils purposes, and fulfils too the very purposes of our ideas.

I have emphasized death as merely one instance, and by no means of course the worst instance, of that inestimably pathetic story of human defeat and misfortune to which our previous examples a moment ago made reference. Now of course I accept to the full the responsibility of our theory to account in the end, not for the mere fact that some finite purposes are defeated, but for the fact that, in human experience, the very purposes which refer, as ideal strivings, to certain objects as their ends, appear, so far as our more direct mortal ken extends, to be for the instant defeated in presence of the very objects to which they have made reference. It is I who fear my friend’s death, and hope for his survival. Yet he dies. I have thought beforehand of my object,