Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/606

Rh conceived is also given. We finally suppose this to be such an experience, for the Self whose Kette this is, that in possessing this series he views himself as this Being and no other. Now this last feature of itself constitutes determinateness. To demand that the series should have its end, temporal or spatial, is to mistake wholly the nature of individuality; is to overlook the primacy of the decisive Will as the sole begetter of individuality; and is to apply to the Absolute a character derived from certain experiences of ours which we merely view as individual experiences in the light of a postulate, while, for this very postulate, only the Absolute itself can furnish the adequate warrant and realization.

Our own definition of individuality then, by freeing us from bondage to mere temporal and spatial limits, leaves us free to regard as determinate and as real an experience that contains, and that does not merely “absorb” a wealth of detail which in itself is endless. In so far as this wealth is endless, it does indeed force every process of successive synthesis to remain unfinished; and therefore, in so far as you merely count the successive steps, you shall never find what makes the whole determinate. There is indeed no infinite number belonging to, or terminating, the series of whole numbers. All whole numbers are finite. It is the totality of the whole numbers that constitutes an infinite multitude. But the determinateness of this infinite whole is given, not when the last whole number is counted (for that indeed would be self-contradictory), but when the completely conscious Self knows itself as this Being, and no other. And this it knows not when it performs its last act, but when it views its whole wealth of life as the determinate satisfaction of its Will.

And thus, having vindicated the conception of the really Infinite, we are free, upon the basis of the general argument of these lectures, to assert that the Absolute is no absorber and transmuter, but an explicit possessor and knower of an infinite wealth of organized individual facts, — the facts, namely, of the Absolute Life and Selfhood. How these facts are One and also Many, we now in general know, precisely in so far as we