Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/84

Rh act of attention is the passing expression, namely, by the Will whose embodiment is the whole world of facts. And this very narrowness itself therefore constitutes, not indeed a present momentary act, but a state of our own will, a character of our present interest in the universe. This character is that we attend to only a few facts at a time, while the rest is the vague background of the world. Just as the disappointed lover of our former illustration is defeated, not without the connivance of his own will, although against his main conscious wish, so here, too, it is a present constitution of our own will that is in a genuine sense expressed in our very failure to know the detail of the universe, despite our conscious wish to know more than we do. For this inner conflict of the World Will with itself, this tragedy of satisfaction through the establishment and the overcoming of endless dissatisfaction, is a character of the universal purpose which we shall learn hereafter to appreciate, even as here we meet with an instance of it in the most elementary phenomena of the knowing process.

Our finitude means, then, an actual inattention, — a lack of successful interest, at this conscious instant, in more ''than a very few of the details of the universe. But the'' infinitely numerous other details are in no wise wholly absent from our knowledge, even now. They do “make a difference to us.” Consciously we know them all at once, but know them abstractly, in the form of our acknowledgment of the “rest of the world” as real, over and above the few things we now recognize in detail. And since we are even at this instant, ourselves,