Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/406

Rh as needs, implies, and looks to another to complete its own purpose.

On the other hand, every. such duality of idea and object, or of fragment and whole, is secondary to and subservient to the one will or purpose which the idea partially, and the completed individual life of the object wholly, embodies, and embodies even by including the fragmentary will of every idea. If you want to express the truth in its wholeness, you must not merely say first, There is an idea, and secondly, There is also an object, and thirdly, These two correspond. For when you speak thus, you deal in abstractions; you yourself so far seek as your own Other the very meaning and sense of these abstractions: and merely to speak thus is to define neither truth nor Being. You must rather say: There is an embodied life, a fulfilled meaning, an empirically expressed intent, an individual whole, that attains its own end. This is what we mean when we talk of what is real. To be such a whole life, this alone is to be real. Now of this life my idea, when I speak of an object, is a fragment, as well as, in its relatively present fulfilment, a general type. As a fragment, my idea looks elsewhere for the rest of itself. As a type of imperfect fulfilment, it aims at the complete experience of the whole of this type. But as really one with its object, my idea in thus seeking its Other, seeks only the expression of its own will in an empirical and conscious life. But this life is. For that any idea, true or relatively erroneous, has an object at all, implies such fulfilment.

The that thus comes into unity with the what. What