Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/451

432 momentary embodiment you even now observe, whenever you get any rational idea before your mind.

This view of the nature of Being, as we have asserted, is no arbitrary hypothesis, but is what a close examination discovers to be involved in the very presuppositions of common sense. In some respects, in fact, the essence of this view may be brought home to our ordinary consciousness, if we remember how the forms of space and of time are from moment to moment conceived by everybody as limitless and as universal, and as predetermining the constitution of the whole natural universe, while this whole infinity of both space and time is viewed as homogeneous with the space and time present at the instant to our own consciousness. The well-known case of the principle of contradiction again illustrates how the consciousness of the moment regards itself as warranted in predetermining the essential constitution of all possible beings. Our study of the conception of Being has been intended simply to render explicit and definite what kind of relationship it is which thus links the instant of human consciousness to the eternal constitution of the whole. We have seen indeed that our fourth definition of Reality gives us no right capriciously to predetermine any of the empirical contents of the world not now present to ourselves. But, on the other hand, we have undertaken to assert that the general constitution of this universe is known to us not merely in so far as the principle of contradiction, or as the forms of time and space, give warrant for universal assertions about reality or about some portion of it; but also in so far as the fundamental structure of the universe is essentially both teleological and conscious.