Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/600

Rh ism, as we have seen, is equally committed to the actually infinite.

And yet one will persistently retort, “Your idea of the complete exhaustion of what you all the while declare to be, as infinite, an inexhaustible series, is still a plain contradiction.”

I reply that I am anxious to report the facts, as one finds them whenever one has to deal with any endless Kette. The facts are these: (1) This series, if real, is inexhaustible by any process of successive procedure, whereby one passes from one member to the next. It is then expressly a series with no last term. Try to go through it from first to last, and the process can never be completed. Now this negative character of the series, if it is real, is as true for the Absolute as for a boy at school. In this sense, namely, viewed as a succession, since the series has no last term, its last term cannot be found by God or man, and does not exist. In this sense, too, any effort to