Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/420

Rh versal considerations. Human thought has long been conscious of some aspects of the unity of Being. The world of ordinary experience, of common sense, and of science, has already its provisional unity, which our own idealism must view as a genuine, if fragmentary, hint of the final unity. Let us then next briefly study this relative unity of the empirical world. It will help to free from barren abstractions our own insight.

Our Fourth Conception of Being is through and through, in one of its aspects, an empirical conception. We derive the very idea of fulfilment and of purpose from the relative and transient fulfilment of purpose that any one of our more thoughtful conscious moments presents to us. And despite the foregoing use of abstractions, it is no part of our idealistic plan to undertake to deduce a priori any of the special facts that may exist anywhere in the universe. For our view of the that predetermines indeed the general constitution of the what, but not our power to predict, apart from experience, what nature and finite mind, what space and time, are to contain. Accordingly in reviewing the empirical world with reference to the special nature of its unity, we must once more be subject to the control of the facts of the universe as known to common sense and to science. We must frankly recognize the seeming varieties of these facts. We must look for unity only in the midst of their empirical diversity. We must see in what sense just this empirical world is to be interpreted in terms of our Fourth Conception. And, in fact, when we thus turn back to experience as our guide, the knowable universe appears a refractory object to which to apply our theory of the unity of Being.