Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/44

Rh lectual inquiry.” Yes, — I answer, the present moment may answer, and does answer up to a certain point, although never completely, certain specific questions that have been submitted to it, by my former processes of inquiry, for its definite verification. If I have asked a specific question: “Does some word now sound?” “Is this definite hypothesis now verified?” — then a present, although always a fragmentary and unsatisfactory answer, may be possible. But my consciousness, even now, has its background as well as its foreground, its obscurity as well as its clearness, its presented questions as to its own constitution as well as its presented answers to definite questions. And nobody amongst us human beings, as now we are, can verify precisely the whole of what it is that the present moment furnishes to his experience. In other words, the present experience itself, or even the verification of the facts of this present experience, has more Being than I am able now to observe. It is more than it at present shows; it means infinitely more than it brings to the light of passing human consciousness. Just this aspect of the present moment was the one that we emphasized when we defined our Fourth Conception, and our relation to the “Other” which a finite consciousness always seeks as its own fulfilment.

Whatever, then, it is that I now verify, and whatever sense or degree of verification I count as sufficient, still, the very fact known to me through verification may be also known, through an indirect demonstration, to contain more Being than I verify. Thus let us suppose again that I verify the fact of my present utterance of words. If I do