Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/445

426 Absolute Experience. Nor does this mean that at this, your present human and temporal instant, at this hour of the clock, the divine and final moment of consciousness has just now the future and the past before it at a glance. For your own grasp of the contents of your passing instant of consciousness faces at once a series of successive events, but also does not therefore bring before your insight all the successive contents of any present moment at any one temporal point within that present moment. What your own passing consciousness is to grasp at once, within the range of its own time-span, consists of facts which are successive one to another. Now our assertion is that precisely such a grasp of successive facts in one unity of consciousness is characteristic of the Absolute Consciousness in its relation to the whole of time, precisely in so far as the temporal form of realization is valid at all. And that this temporal form has its place in the final unity we know, just because time is for us the conditio sine qua non of all ethical significance.

The case of temporal unity is typical of every instance of the application of our Fourth Conception. In so far as your ideas now possess internal meaning, you grasp Many in One. You do not therefore lose the many in the unity, any more than you lose the notes in the melody. Ethical meanings do not involve the mere blending of details in a single whole. Rational insight wins unity only through variety.

And now what our Fourth Conception asserts is that God’s life, for God’s life we must now call this absolute fulfilment which our Fourth Conception defines, sees the one plan fulfilled through all the manifold lives, the single