Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/594

Rh what principle of multiplicity is here at work, of how the One and the Many here concerned are related, and of what decision of Will would give these forms a concrete meaning in the universal life.

It remains, then, returning to the typical case of the numbers, to see in what sense a determinate expression of their whole meaning can be found in the life of a Will that fulfils itself through exclusive decisions, but that does not ignore any genuinely significant aspect of the truth. For our Absolute is not in such wise exclusive of content as to impoverish its wealth of ideal characters; and, on the other hand, it is not in such wise inclusive of bare possibilities as to oppose to whatever fact it chooses as its own, the fatal Other deed of Amadeus Hoffman’s double-willed and distracted hero.

And here, of course, an opponent of the actual Infinite will be ready with the very common observation that the numbers are indeed, apart from the concrete objects numbered, of a trivial validity. “In a life,” he may say, “in a world of decisions and of concrete values, a barren contemplation of the properties of the numbers can have but a narrow place. Hence, no fulfilment of the hopeless task of wandering from number to number need be expected as a part of the Absolute life.”

Moreover, such an objector will insist that all these Ketten involve mere repetition of the same sort of experience over and over. “To carry such repetition to the infinite end, what purpose,” he will say, “can such an ideal fulfil?” The individual fulfilment of the meaning of the number-series, in the final view, may well, then, take the form of knowing that there are indeed numbers, that they are made in a certain way, that the plan of their order has a particular type, and that this type is exemplified thus and thus by a comparatively few concretely presented ideas of whole numbers. Otherwise, the numbers may be left as unrealized as are those other excluded possibilities of the Will exemplified.

But against this view one has next to point out that, observed a little more closely, even the numbers have characters not reducible to any limited collection of universal types.