Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/438

Rh ultimate nature of the divine plan may, and in general does, vastly transcend, but simply cannot ignore. Your truth from the absolute point of view will appear, indeed, as a partial truth, but not upon that account as untrue. The interesting doctrine of the “Degrees of Truth and Reality” which Mr. Bradley has lately developed afresh, although, as I think, Mr. Bradley has given this doctrine too negative a form, remains upon its positive side, the common property of all the synthetic forms of post-Kantian Idealism. Recognizing, as of course I distinctly do, the close historical relation of what I am saying to the whole tradition of recent Idealism, I can only point out here that our human interpretation of the unity of Being, however much it may be supplemented, in however different a light it may appear from some higher point of view, remains, in its own relative degree, true, just in so far as it is at once an assertion of unity, and a concrete illustration of that unity by facts found somewhere within the realm of man's actual experience. An abstractly immediate experience of unity, such as the mystic sought, may remain either barren, or a mere prophecy of some more philosophical doctrine. A hasty account of the unity of nature, such as Aristotle's system founded upon the optical illusion of the rotation of the outermost heaven about the earth, is already more concrete in its unification of many natural phenomena in a single scheme. It has been superseded, but only by a science whose natural phenomena are seen to be in still more significant and deeper relations. Our own present largest generalization, which unites the things and processes of nature and mind in one in the way just indicated, may need very real correction