Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/410

Rh it, is a mere Animism. We know, they say, that the world is real; but how should we know that its inner Being, so foreign to ours, resembles our own will? But our own Fourth Conception of Being is not in the older sense animistic. For it does not first say, The world is known to be real, and then add, And we conjecture that this reality resembles that of our own will. What our view asserts is that the world is and can be real only as the object expressing in final, in individual form, the whole meaning which our finite will, imperfectly embodied in fleeting instants, seeks and attempts to define as its own Other, and also as precisely its own ultimate expression. In other words, the world, from our point of view, becomes real only as such an ultimate expression of our ideas. But when the sceptic here retorts, But perhaps then no world is real at all, we reply with the now several times repeated observation that the non-being of any specific object is subject to the same conditions as the Being of all things. What is not, is not, merely because our complete object, the complete expression of our whole meaning, when, in this transient moment, we speak of the thing that is not, excludes its presence. The very possibility of our ignorance and error implies the presence of the whole self-conscious truth.

Results in philosophy must needs lead to new problems. With this definition in mind of what it is to be, how shall we next undertake to describe that more special constitution of the world which our concept of Being involves?

The general title of our course called attention to a