Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/405

386 of ideas. What is, is as such the perfect, the absolute, the finality, and in this respect we have indeed found the mystic to be right. But the mystic sought the highest good of his always consciously imperfect ideas in their own simple extinction. And this void proved to be meaningless. Here then was, so far, no positive reality. We therefore abandoned this region for the more concrete world of modern Critical Rationalism. Here the ideas were indeed different from their objects, and corresponded to them. But our difficulty in this realm was to define, after all, how our objects were other than our ideas, while still remaining authorities to which we made valid reference. And so we were still discontent in this world of Critical Rationalism. We waited until it should be transformed into another.

The Fourth Conception of Being has now undertaken to bring into harmony the motives of all the three other conceptions. What is, is other than the mere idea, yet not because it externally corresponds thereto, but because it completely expresses, in a form that is ultimately individual, the very meaning that the finite idea consciously, but partially and abstractly, embodies in its own general form. The idea wills its own complete expression. What is, fulfils the whole intent of the idea. What is, is therefore at once empirical, for it embodies the idea; significant, for it expresses a meaning; an individual, for it gives the idea such an expression as seeks no other beyond. Whatever is less than such a completed life as this, is a fragment of Being, a finite idea still consciously in search of its own wholeness, a mere kind of relative fulfilment such