Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/442

Rh determine the relations of its various contents, what contents supplement our own and provide for the final enrichment of the Absolute Life, — all this we of course cannot predetermine. Yet what our conception maintains is simply this: —

Survey our life, consider our experience. Look at nature as we men find it. Take account of our temporal and spatial universe. Review the results of our science. In all this you will discover manifold meanings relatively obtained, manifold interrelationships binding together facts that at first sight appear sundered, universality predetermining what had seemed accidental, and a vast fundamental ontological unity linking in its deathless embrace past, present, future, and what for us seem to be the merely possible forms of Being. Man you shall find dependent for his moral personality upon his fellows, upon nature as a whole for his evolution, and upon his own ideas, poor and finite and fleeting although they are, for his very consciousness of his relation to the universe.

Well, now, in addition to all these glimpses of unity, you shall see, too, countless signs of fragmentariness, countless seemingly chaotic varieties. We know the formula for dealing with all these in the light of our conception. These are precisely the facts whose fragmentariness sends us to Another for the explanation, yes, for our very idea of any one of them. But just such cases show themselves hereby as instances of universal principles, whose concrete meaning is not yet empirically present to us at this instant. Wherever we question, we have ideas, but not yet an experience of