Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/586

Rh mere thinking about external meanings, the world is not finally defined. The restlessly infinite, as such, they have condemned as in so far unreal. For whoever sees reality, sees that which has no Other like itself, which seeks no Other to define its being, which is itself no mere correspondence between one object and another, and, despite its unquestionable character as the fulfilment of thought, no mere agreement between a thought and a fact. The Heal, then, has not the character which bare thought, as such, emphasizes, — the character of being essentially incomplete. It has wholeness. Its meaning is internal and not external. Therefore, it is indeed a finished fact. It cannot, then, be infinite if infinity implies incompleteness.

But, once more, is the Real for that reason finite? Because it excludes the search for another beyond itself, does it therefore contain no infinite wealth of presented content within itself? This is precisely the question. In emphasizing the exclusiveness of the Real we must be just to the fact that, whatever it excludes, it cannot, from our point of view, be poorer, less wealthy, less manifold in genuine meaning, than the false Other, which its reality reduces to a bare and unrealized possibility of thought. That the world is what it determinately is, means, from our point of view, that its being excludes an infinitely complex system of “barely possible” other contents, which, just because they are excluded from Reality, are conceived by a thought such that not all of its “barely possible” ideal objects could conceivably be actualized at once. In this sense, for us, just as for the partisans of the barely possible and unactualized infinite, there are indeed ideas of infinitely numerous facts which remain, from an Absolute point of view, hypotheses contrary to fact. We agree, moreover, with our opponents, that no process expresses reality in so far as this process merely seeks, without end, for another and another object or fact. Hence, for us, as for our opponents, the Infinite, when taken merely as an endless