Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/585

566 here follows. The concept of the actually Infinite once in general vindicated from the charge of self-contradiction, all objection to conceiving the Absolute as a Self will vanish; and the transparent union of the One and the Many, which reflective thought has already shown us within its own realm, will become the universal law of Being.

But, on the other hand, if the Absolute is a Self, and, as such, an Infinite, this does not mean that it is anything yon please, or that it is at once all possible things, or that it views its realm of fact as having all possible characters at once, and hence as having no character in particular. This Self, and no Other, this world and no Other, this totality of experience, and nothing else, — such is what has to be presented when the Real is known as the real. The Infinite will have to be also a determinate Infinite, a self-selected case of its type. For the world as merely thought, or as merely defined in idea, is the world viewed with an abstract or bare universality, and as that which still demands its Other, and which refers to that Other as valid and possible. The world of thought is, as such, an effort to characterize this Other, to imitate it, to correspond to it, and, of course, if so may be, to find it. Hence the world of mere thought has, as its very life, a principle of dissatisfaction; and when it conceives its object as the Truth, it defines, in the object, only the sense in which there is to be agreement or correspondence between the object and the thought. Consequently, an idea taken merely as an imitation of another, or taken as having an external meaning, expresses the Truth only as a barely universal validity. And one who merely takes thought as thought conceives the shadow land which shall, nevertheless, somehow have the value of a standard. In that realm, — the realm of mere validity, — all is mere character, and type, and possibility. And thought is the endlessly restless definition of another, and yet another. And this is true even when thought conceives an Infinite. Hence, infinity, as merely conceived, is indeed not yet Reality as Reality.

Now, the opponents of the actual Infinite, ever since Aristotle, have always seen, and rightly seen, that, as defined by