Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/582

Rh that I know, and know that I know, and so on. The non-mathematical often dislike numbers, especially the large ones, and therefore easily make light of a wisdom that seems only to count, in monotonous inefficacy. Even the more reflective thinkers often believe, with Spinoza, that knowing that I know can imply nothing essentially new, at all events after the reflection has been two or three times repeated. The Hindoo imagination, with its love for large numbers, often strikes the Western mind as childish. And in all such cases, since mere size, as such, rightly seems unworthy of the admiration that it has excited in untrained minds, it has appeared to many to be the more rational thing to say that wisdom involves rather Hegel’s Rückkehr aus der unendlichen Flucht than any acceptance of the notion that infinite magnitudes or multitudes can be real.

All the foregoing objections to the conception of the actually infinite rest, in large measure, upon a true and perfectly relevant principle. As a fact, what is real is ipso facto determinate and individual. It is this for the reasons pointed out in the closing lectures of the present series. It is this because it is such that No Other can take its place. The Real is the final, the determinate, the totality. And now, not only is this principle valid, but it is indeed supreme in every metaphysical inquiry. And therefore we shall, to be sure, find it true that in case, despite all the foregoing highly important objections, we succeed in reconciling infinity with determinateness, we shall still be unable to assert that the Reality is anything merely infinite. For infinity, as such, is at best a character, — a feature having the value of an universal. If the Absolute is in any sense an infinite system, it is certainly also an unique and individual system; and its uniqueness involves something very clearly distinguishable from its mere infinity. The Absolute is, in its determinate Reality, certainly exclusive of an infinity of mere possibilities. In this respect I shall here simply repeat the position taken in the discussion supple-