Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/61

36 ment of Internal Meaning is merely to carry out to the end this same procedure.

Yet, as one may still insist, the question is not answered, Why do the facts often seem as foreign as they do? Why is their explicit conformity to our purpose, as defined by the Ought, joined with aspects of such hostility to all our purposes? In part this question is simply the problem of Evil, which will concern us later in another connection. In part our further discussion of the categories of experience, in our next lecture, will suggest its answer. In order to express the whole will which comes to our present consciousness in this so fragmentary human form, the facts, as we shall soon see, have to involve aspects that must now seem to us infinitely remote, and consequently, beyond our detailed comprehension at this instant. Thus, as we shall see, even the foreign aspect of the facts fulfils a purpose.

It should be sufficiently plain by this time that in regarding our acknowledgment of facts as an expression of the Will, we do not assert that the will acknowledges facts in any merely capricious way. The will, whose relative satisfaction in this or in that present belief, or undertaking, or act of acknowledgment, or acceptance of the Ought, we have been observing, is known to us at any moment as by no means an altogether free or unconstrained will. Of the relative freedom of the finite will we shall speak hereafter. But for the present, when we say, “It is our own will which expresses itself in our interpretation of the real world,” we are not to be