Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/583

564 mentary to the book called the Conception of God. It is, then, perfectly true, for me, as for the opponents of the actual Infinite, that much must be viewed as, in the abstract, “possible,” which is nowhere determinately presented in any final experience of the fulfilment of truth. The special illustration used, in my former book, to exemplify this fact, namely, the illustration of the points on the continuous line, points which are “possible” in an infinitely infinite collection of ways, but which, however presented, cannot exhaustively constitute the determinate continuity of the line, — this, I say, is an illustration involving other problems besides those of the actual Infinite. The existence of the line, taken as a geometrical fact, contains more than the possible multitudes of multitudes of the points on the line can ever express. And this more includes, also, a something more determinate than the multitudes of the points can conceivably present. Hence, as I argued in my former book, and as I still deliberately maintain, the Absolute cannot experience the nature of the line by merely exhausting any infinitude of the points. But to this illustration I can here devote no further space, since the discussion of continuity, and especially of the geometrical continuum, lies outside of the scope of this paper. It is quite consistent, however, to hold, as I do, that while the Absolute indeed, by reason of its determinateness, excludes and must exclude infinitely infinite “bare possibilities,” known to mere thought, from presentation in any individual way, except as ideas of excluded objects, the Absolute still finds present, in the individual whole of its Selfhood, an actually infinite, because self-representative, system of experienced fact. The points on the line, then, if my former illustration is indeed well chosen, are not exhaustively presented, as constituting the whole line, in any experience, whatever, Absolute or relative. But this, as we now have to see, is not because the actually Infinite is, to the Absolute, something unrepresented, but because the determinate geometrical continuity of the individual line is something more, and more determinate, than any infinitude of