Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/565

546 experience, and to the individuality which, in my agreement with Mr. Bradley, I attribute to the whole. But this first aspect of Being must needs be represented, within itself, by the second, third, and other aspects. In other words, a full possession of the fulfilment of purpose, in final and determinate form, involves, as the first element in the conception of Absolute Being, the fact that purpose is fulfilled. But this fact is experienced, is known, is present, is seen. Otherwise it is no fact, and the world has no Being. But the fact that this first fact is known, or experienced, is itself a fact, a second fact. This, too, is known; and so on without end.

Thirdly, as I conceive, this whole series without end — a series which can equally well be expressed in terms of knowledge and in terms of purpose — is for the final view, and in the Absolute, no series of sundered successive states of temporal experience, but a totum simul, a single, endlessly wealthy experience. And, fourthly, by the very nature of the type of self-representation here in question, no one fashion of self-representation is required as the only one in such a realm of Being. As the England of our illustration could be self-mapped, if at all, then by countless series of various maps, not found in the same part of England and not in the least inconsistent with one another; and as the number-series, — that abstract image of the bare form of every self-representative system of the type here in question, — can be self-represented in endlessly various ways, — so, too, the self-representation of the Absolute permitted by our view is confined to no one necessary case; but is capable of embodiment in as many and various cases of self-representation, in as many different forms of selfhood, each individual, as the nature of the absolute plan involves. So that our view of the Selfhood of the Absolute, if possible at all, leaves room for various forms of individuality within the one Absolute; and we have a new opening for a possible Many in One, — an opening whose value we shall have to test in another way in our second series of lectures.

Our own view, then, also implies that the Absolute is a