Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/593

574 mere thinking can characterize, but never exhaust. Thus, and thus only, can be found that which admits of no Other. So far, then, it is indeed true that nothing is proved real merely by proving its abstract consistency as a mere idea taken apart from the rest of the world.

Or, again, the realm of validity is not exhausted by presented fact in the way suggested by one of Amadeus Hoffman’s most horrible fancies (I believe in the Elixiere des Teufels), according to which a hero, persistently beset by a double, always finds that, whenever he, in his relative strength, resists a great temptation, and avoids a crime, this miserable double, whom he all the while vaguely takes to be in a way himself, appears, — pale, wretched, fate-driven, — and does, or at least attempts, in very fact, the deed that the hero had rejected. No; whoever knows Being, finds himself satisfied in the presence of a will fulfilled, and needs no fate-driven other Self, no outcast double, to realize for him the possibilities whose validity he rejects. For in rejecting, he wins. And Being is a destruction as well as an accomplishment of Experience.

Upon all this I have elsewhere insisted. That the very essence of individuality is a Will that permits no Other to take the place of this fulfilment, — a Love that finds in this wholeness of life its own, — I have pointed out in an argument that the Tenth Lecture of the present course has merely summarized. And therefore I am perfectly prepared to admit that when we define as valid, in the realm of mathematical truth, an infinite wealth of ideal forms, we need not, on that account alone, and apart from other reasons, declare that the Absolute Life realizes these forms in their variety as defined by us. Their true meaning it must somehow get present to itself, — otherwise it would face Another of which it was essentially ignorant. But its realization of their meaning may well imply an exclusion of their variety, just in so far as that variety, when conceived by us, expresses our ignorance of