Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/468

Rh ing fulfilled, discovers at once a wealth of contents, and a very sharply specific exclusiveness of interest fulfilled by these contents.

A satisfied will, a fully expressed meaning, would involve, then, the twofold consciousness that we may express by the two phrases, (1) I have all that I seek, and need no other; (2) I need precisely these contents, and so select them as to permit no other to take here and for this purpose their place. As a matter of fact, then, a will satisfied, a precisely determinate meaning expressed in facts, is as selective and exclusive on the one hand, as, on the other hand, it is possessed of an exhaustive wealth of contents which meet its selection.

Now it is this selective character of every rational conscious process, a character as manifest to consciousness as it is ultimately significant for the constitution of all Being, — it is this character, I say, which to my mind is responsible above all for the Individuality which we have already characterized as belonging to the whole of Being, and which we shall now find as equally characistic of every region of finite Being. Strange as it may at first seem, a closer examination of the nature of truth makes easily manifest that what is, quite apart from any causal theory, must be viewed by the consciousness that faces Being as a selection from abstractly possible contents. The nature of these contents in general is recognized, and is so far present, at the very moment when the realization of this nature in the single shape selected from amongst all possible shapes is, at the same time, experienced.

This general view, that what is, is a selection from