Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/437

418 their own meaning, are not the only ideas of which this can be asserted. It is not until man views himself as a member of an universal society, whose temporal estrangements are merely incidental to their final unity of meaning, that man rationally appreciates the actual sense of the conscious ideas that express his longing for oneness with an absolute life. We are related to God through our consciousness of our fellows. And our fellows, in the end, prove to be far more various than the mere men. It is one office of philosophy to cultivate this deeper sense of companionship with the world. And precisely in this sense of deeper comradeship with nature will lie the future reconciliation of religion and science.

And so, when we speak of the final unity of the world-life, we have no right to define that unity merely in terms of the special categories of the distinctively human type of consciousness. Our foregoing sketch of the manner in which, for us men, present, past, future, physical, mental, mathematical, and moral reality seem to be linked in a single system, is not therefore by itself a sufficient basis for stating the way in which the whole meaning of reality gets presented to the single unity of the consciousness that we have already called divine.

On the other hand, the very essence of our Idealism lies in asserting that just in so far as you have become conscious, not of a merely abstract form of possible unity, but of a sense in which your experience already unites many in one, you have become acquainted with a fact which the