Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/591

572 concrete, or else, just because the infinite is valid, it has its place, as fact, in the determinate experience of the Absolute. At all events, the Infinite, in such cases as have just been cited, is something quite as determinately valid as any barely universal conception can be. And unless it is true that two and two would make four in a world where no experience ever observed the fact, it is true that the infinitely numerous properties of the numbers need some concrete representation.

I grant, however, that these are but preliminary considerations. Every validity, as a bare universal, must be a reflectively abstract expression of a fact that ultimately exists in individual embodiment in the Absolute. Yet, on the other hand, you cannot predetermine the nature of this individual expression merely by pointing out that the possibilities in question appear to us endless. For the endlessness might be one of those matters of bare external conjunction of which Mr. Bradley so often speaks. Thus space appears to us endless. I fully grant that we are not warranted in making any one assertion about the Absolute view of the meaning of our spatial experience, by virtue of the mere fact that going on and on endlessly in space appears to us possible, and that, consequently, we can define propositions that would be valid if this possibility is endlessly realized by the Absolute. In passing from the Third to the Fourth Conception of Being, what we did was to see that nothing can be valid unless a determinate individual experience has present to it all that gives warrant for this validity. Because our fleeting experience never gives such final warrant, we are forced to seek for the ground and the basis of any valid truth once recognized by us, and to seek this basis in a realm that is Other than our own experience as it comes to us. This Other is, finally, the Absolute in its wholeness. But we do not assert that the Absolute realizes our validity merely as we happen to think it.

When we regard any valid truth as implying a variety of valid assertions, all for us matters of conceived possible experience, we often take the Many, thus conceived by us, as a mere fact, an uncomprehended “conjunction.” I agree altogether with