Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/587

568 process, is falsely taken. As merely that which you cannot exhaust by counting, the Infinite is, by the hypothesis, never found, presented or completed, so long as you simply count. Hence we wholly agree that the Infinite, just in so far as it is viewed as indeterminate, incomplete, or merely endless, is not rightly viewed; and that in so far it is indeed unreal. We also fully agree that Absolute knowledge unquestionably recognizes, as an object for its own relatively abstract thought, a distinctly unreal Infinite, namely, the Infinite of the excluded ideal “bare possibilities” aforesaid. In all this we quite agree with our opponents, and prize their insistence upon the determinateness of the final truth.

Nevertheless, we shall perforce insist upon these theses: —

(1) The true Infinite, both in multitude and in organization, although in one sense endless, and so incapable in that sense of being completely grasped, is in another and precise sense something perfectly determinate. Nor is it a mere monotonous repetition of the same, over and over. Each of its determinations has individuality, uniqueness, and novelty about its own nature.

(2) This determinateness is a character which, indeed, includes and involves the endlessness of an infinite series; but the mere endlessness of the series is not its primary character, being simply a negatively stated result of the self-representative character of the whole system.

(3) The endlessness of the series means that by no merely successive process of counting, in God or in man, is its wholeness ever exhausted.

(4) In consequence, the whole endless series, in so far as it is a reality, must be present, as a determinate order, but also all at once, to the Absolute Experience. It is the process of successive counting, as such, that remains, to the end, incomplete, so as to imply that its own possibilities are not yet realized. Hence, the recurrent processes of thought reveal eternal truth about the infinite constitution of real Being, — their everlasting pursued Other; but themselves, — as mere processes in time, — they are not that Other. Their true Other