Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/399

380 Look, then, elsewhere. Seek not the living among the dead.

But you will reply: Have we not just admitted that death itself is, like any other amongst our countless human disasters, a fact of experience? Is not a fact an object? Is not an object real? Have we not ourselves called it so? Aye, but we have not said that death is by itself a Whole object. Death, as far as it comes into our experience, is indeed a glimpse of fact, but in the moral world it is the most fragmentary of such glimpses of reality. Whoever faces it faces nothing that he finds as an individual and present reality. What he observes is the absence of precisely what he himself defines as the Whole of Being that he seeks, — the very longing of an unfulfilled idea, which defines the Other, and looks elsewhere for the reality.

Now our theory merely consists in asserting that in every such case the reality sought is a life, and a concrete life of fulfilment, and that this reality is, and is in its wholeness, elsewhere than at this fragmentary instant of human experience. Human experience offers, so far as it goes, only a confirmation of this our view. For we have said that true Being is essentially a Whole Individual Fact, that does not send you beyond itself, and that is, therefore, in its wholeness, deathless. Where death is, Being in its wholeness is not.

“But,” so one insists, “but my grief, my defeat, my despair; are they not real? And are they real as determined facts?” I reply: Our theory is indeed responsible for an account of how the temporal and empirical defeat of a specific, although always fragmentary, human pur-