Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/450



we have been right in our foregoing discussions, the first principles of religious doctrine have a foundation as simple as the meaning of those principles is inexhaustible. So long as you first assume that the world of fact is merely given, independent of ideas, is found by us as such an independent reality, then indeed every effort to interpret the world quickly loses its way in the labyrinth of our experience. But remember, before you are thus lost, that the world is real only as the object of true ideas, and then your fundamental problem at once becomes that of the essential relation of idea and object. This relation is then the world-knot. Nor does that knot prove insoluble. At any moment, despite the mysteries of experience, you have in your hands the essential solution. For the relation of idea and object is essentially the relation of a partial meaning to a totally expressed rational meaning. And, as we have already seen, and in the present lecture shall further illustrate, the relation of partial and total meaning is, at the same time, the relation of any finite will to the expression of the complete intent of that same will. Without contradiction, therefore, you are unable to assert the real Being of any world, unless you conceive that world as the expressed will whose partial