Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/599

580 universal fecundity of reflective processes, as merely illustrated by the wealth of the number-forms, is an argument a fortiori.

It is easy, as we have seen, to make light of mere numbers because they are so formal, and because one wearies of mathematics. But our present case is simply this: Of course the numbers, taken in abstract divorce from life, are mere forms. But if in the bare skeleton of selfhood, if in the dry bones of that museum of mere orderliness, the arithmetical series, — if, even here, we find such an endless wealth of relatively unique results of each new act of reflection, in case that act is taken in synthesis with the foregoing acts, — what may not be, what must be, the wealth of meaning involved in a reflective series whose basis is a concrete life, whose reflections give this life at each stage new insight into itself, and whose syntheses with all foregoing acts of reflection are themselves, if temporally viewed, as it were, new acts in the drama of this life? If such a life is to be present totum simul to the Absolute, how shall not the results of endless acts of reflection, each of an individual meaning, but all given, at one stroke, as an expression of the single purpose to reflect and to be self-possessed, — how shall all these facts not appear as elements in the unity of the whole, elements neither “transmuted” nor “suppressed,” but comprehended in their organic unity?

Unless the Absolute is a Self, and that concretely and explicitly, it is no Absolute at all. And unless it exhausts an infinity, in its presentations, it cannot be a Self. That even in thus exhausting it also excludes from itself the infinity that it wills to exclude, I equally insist. But I also maintain that this exclusion can only be based upon insight, and that, unless the positive infinity is present, as the self-represented whole that is accepted, the exclusion is blind, and our conception of Being lapses into mere Realism. But even Real-