Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/584

Rh points can express. And this individuality of the line I can and do express by saying that, even to a final view, the essence of the individual continuity of any one line involves the “bare possibility” of systems of ideal points over and above any that are found present in this final experience of the line. Even if the Absolute, then, observes infinitely infinite collections of points, it sees that the individual continuity of the line is more than they present. This I still assert.

In general, as we shall see, by virtue of what here follows, a fair account of the completeness of the Absolute must be just to two aspects. They are the ultimate aspects of Reality. Their union constitutes, once more, the world-knot. And the reason of their union is the one made explicit in our seventh Lecture. The Real is determinate and individual; and the Real is expressive of all that universal ideas, taken in their wholeness, actually demand, or mean, as their absolutely satisfactory fulfilment. In this twofold thesis, as I understand, I am wholly in agreement with Mr. Bradley. But I differ from him by maintaining that we know more than he admits concerning how the Real combines these two aspects. I maintain, then, with a full consciousness of the paradoxes involved, that the Reality is indeed a Self, whatever else it is or is not. For the Absolute, as I insist, would have to be not apparently, but really a Self, even in order to be (as Mr. Bradley seems to imagine his Absolute) a sort of self-absorbing sponge, that endlessly sucked in, and “transformed,” its own selfhood, until nothing was left of itself but the mere empty spaces where the absorbent Self had been. For the category of Self is indeed immortal. Deny it, and, in denying, you affirm it. As a fact, however, the Absolute is no sponge. It is not a cryptic or self-ashamed, but an absolutely self-expressive self. And to see how it can be so without contradiction, is simply to see how the concept of the actually Infinite, despite all the foregoing objections, is not self-contradictory, is not indeterminate, is not merely based upon wearisome reflections of the same; but is a positive and concrete conception, quite capable of individual embodiment. This is what we shall see in what