Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/441

422 both psychological and ethical, it is almost impossible to estimate. A consciousness for which events that happened within a millionth of a second constituted a definite and observable serial succession of present facts, or, on the other hand, a consciousness for which the events occurring during a thousand years were as much present at once, to a single glance at temporal succession, as are now, to us, the successions that, while not too rapid, occur within a time-span of two seconds, — either one of these types of consciousness would have a profoundly different basis for estimating the significance of any given empirical facts of succession. The acts of moral agents whose consciousness thus differed from ours would have a vastly different meaning from our own.

Our idea of what it is to be conscious is therefore, logically speaking, an extremely variable idea. But for that very reason, our Fourth Conception of Being, while it certainly cannot be applied to the effort to conceive the empirical world in unity, without a full recognition of possible variations of the form of consciousnesss, has all the more freedom in undertaking the general task of viewing, as fragmentary aspects of one whole meaning, the varieties of nature and of finite individuality. For it is precisely the wholeness, and not the mere fragmentariness, the presence, and not the mere absence of unity in our consciousness, the relative attainment, and not the mere postponement of our meanings, which, from this point of view, guides us towards a positive view of how the unity of Being is, in the midst of all the varieties, attained. How in detail the final unity is won, what categories precisely