Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/76

Rh results of our act. It is also the case wherever we look for an expected object, and looking find the object. In such instances the realm of the ideal appears to us constantly to extend. We then say either that we control facts by our will, or else that we confirm our intellectual expectations as we go. Or again, we may succeed in recognizing and interpreting the immediate data in terms of our ideas. In such cases we feel at home in our world. But when the data, as so often happens, remain obdurate, decline to be recognized, disappoint expectations, or refuse our voluntary control, then, whatever our theory of the universe, and whatever our practical business may be, we have on our hands some instance of the endless finite conflict of mere experience and mere idea. These two aspects of our lives, the immediate aspect and the ideal aspect, then show themselves in sharp contrast. Ideal meditation and brute immediacy stand in opposition to each other. We then know our finitude, and we are inwardly disquieted thereby. Such disquietude is our almost normal experience as finite wanderers. The situation may be one of private toil or of public controversy, of practical struggle or of theoretical uncertainty; but in any such case, amid the endless variety of our lives, the conflict retains essentially and profoundly similar features, — purpose at war with fortune, idea with datum, meaning with chaos, — such is the life of our narrow flickering moments, and in so far as we are indeed finite, in so far as our will wins not yet its whole battle, our intellect grasps not the truth that it seeks.

Practically, this conflict has other names; but viewing it theoretically, namely, with reference to the contents