Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/419

400 to knowledge has not yet been defined. But if whatever exists, exists only as known, the existence of knowledge itself must be a known existence, and can finally be known only to the final knower himself, who, like Aristotle’s God, is so far defined in terms of absolute self-knowledge.

Herewith the purely abstract statement of the consequences of our Fourth Conception, so far as it concerns the unity of the world, has been made, in the only form consistent with our conception. What is, is present to the insight of a single Self-conscious Knower, whose life includes all that he knows, whose meaning is wholly fulfilled in his facts, and whose self-consciousness is complete. And our reason for asserting this as the Reality lies in the now thoroughly expounded doctrine that no other conception of Being than this one can be expressed without absolute self-contradiction. Whoever denies this conception covertly, so we affirm, asserts it whenever, expressly or by implication, he talks of Being at all. For to talk of Being is to speak of fact that is either present to a consciousness or else is nothing. And from that one aspect of our definition which is involved in the thesis that whatever is, is consciously known, all the foregoing view of the unity of Being inevitably follows.

Such an abstract general statement of the results of our definition of what it is to be, may well be illustrated, however, through an approach to the whole matter of the unity of Being from another side, namely, from the more empirical side. For in conceiving of all that is as a single whole, as the life, the meaning, and the consciousness of a single Self, we are not limited to merely uni-