Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/480

Rh the absolute purpose, as an empirical fact, is its own fulfilment. For, according to our central thesis, except as consciously fulfilling a purpose, nothing can, logically speaking, exist at all. In the second place we have also maintained that the fulfilment of the divine purpose is twofold, involving at once wealth of experience conforming to the one meaning, and selection both of the facts which express the meaning, and of the precise and individual determination of the meaning itself. The world that thus expresses meaning appears, from the absolute point of view, as an unique whole, but as also an unique selected whole, such that neither for the whole nor for any of the parts could any other fact be substituted, without failure in the realization of precisely this totality of determinate meaning. And consequently, quite apart from any causal theory, that selective aspect which common sense already regards as essential to the will does indeed appear in our account as a real and logically required character of the divine or absolute will. In the third place, however, we find a similarly selective character belonging to our own will, and an experience of such selection we find in that sort of exclusive interest whereby, even in advance of knowledge, we undertake to define the individuality which we presuppose in all the objects of our more exclusive affection.

If you ask, from this point of view, in what sense the world is to be called rather the expression of the Divine Will, and in what sense it is rather the expression of the Divine Knowledge, I reply that while we have by no means separated these two aspects of the universe, we can now easily see the convenience from many points of view