# The World and the Individual, First Series/Lecture 9

LECTURE IX
UNIVERSALITY AND UNITY
The concept of Being often passes for the most abstract of human ideas. If the first outcome of our quest, as presented in the two foregoing discussions, is sound, the true concept of Being is the most concrete and living of all our ideas.
I
We began these lectures indeed with an abstraction, with the contrast between telling what an ideal object is, and asserting that this object exists. We called this the contrast between the internal and the external meaning of ideas. This abstraction Realism carried to the extreme, asserting that the idea finds the external object merely as its indifferent fate. All relations between the two are, for Realism, additional facts, existent over and above the primary indifference. Hereupon, however, the inner self-destruction of Realism, which we found to be the logical result of these assumptions, drove us, as we sought for truth, into the mystic’s realm. There we first learned something of the deeper meaning of the ancient thesis: Omne Ens est bonum, — a thesis which indeed appears in Aristotle’s doctrine, but which can never be justified on a realistic basis. To be appeared in this world of the mystic to mean the same as to fulfil the inner purpose ​of ideas. What is, is as such the perfect, the absolute, the finality, and in this respect we have indeed found the mystic to be right. But the mystic sought the highest good of his always consciously imperfect ideas in their own simple extinction. And this void proved to be meaningless. Here then was, so far, no positive reality. We therefore abandoned this region for the more concrete world of modern Critical Rationalism. Here the ideas were indeed different from their objects, and corresponded to them. But our difficulty in this realm was to define, after all, how our objects were other than our ideas, while still remaining authorities to which we made valid reference. And so we were still discontent in this world of Critical Rationalism. We waited until it should be transformed into another.
The Fourth Conception of Being has now undertaken to bring into harmony the motives of all the three other conceptions. What is, is other than the mere idea, yet not because it externally corresponds thereto, but because it completely expresses, in a form that is ultimately individual, the very meaning that the finite idea consciously, but partially and abstractly, embodies in its own general form. The idea wills its own complete expression. What is, fulfils the whole intent of the idea. What is, is therefore at once empirical, for it embodies the idea; significant, for it expresses a meaning; an individual, for it gives the idea such an expression as seeks no other beyond. Whatever is less than such a completed life as this, is a fragment of Being, a finite idea still consciously in search of its own wholeness, a mere kind of relative fulfilment such ​as needs, implies, and looks to another to complete its own purpose.
On the other hand, every . such duality of idea and object, or of fragment and whole, is secondary to and subservient to the one will or purpose which the idea partially, and the completed individual life of the object wholly, embodies, and embodies even by including the fragmentary will of every idea. If you want to express the truth in its wholeness, you must not merely say first, There is an idea, and secondly, There is also an object, and thirdly, These two correspond. For when you speak thus, you deal in abstractions; you yourself so far seek as your own Other the very meaning and sense of these abstractions: and merely to speak thus is to define neither truth nor Being. You must rather say: There is an embodied life, a fulfilled meaning, an empirically expressed intent, an individual whole, that attains its own end. This is what we mean when we talk of what is real. To be such a whole life, this alone is to be real. Now of this life my idea, when I speak of an object, is a fragment, as well as, in its relatively present fulfilment, a general type. As a fragment, my idea looks elsewhere for the rest of itself. As a type of imperfect fulfilment, it aims at the complete experience of the whole of this type. But as really one with its object, my idea in thus seeking its Other, seeks only the expression of its own will in an empirical and conscious life. But this life is. For that any idea, true or relatively erroneous, has an object at all, implies such fulfilment.
The that thus comes into unity with the what. What ​my object is, my idea at this instant not only imperfectly defines, but fragmentarily presents in its own transient way. That my object is, is true in so far as the whole what of my object is empirically expressed in an individual life, which is my real world.
Thus, although Realism assured us that the what could never predetermine the that, the essence never prove the existence, and although this has become a mere commonplace of popular metaphysic, we now have found how the that, the very existence of the world, predetermines the what, or the essence of things, and the fact of Being has become for us the richest of concrete facts.
For despite the relative failures and errors of our finitude, the real world cannot fail to express the whole genuine intent of our ideas, their completely understood internal meaning. Ideas, in other words, in so far as they are consistent with their own completed ideal purpose, cannot remain unexpressed in a concrete life of individual experience. For if they remained unexpressed, their final meaning could only take the form of hypotheses whose verbal statement would begin with an if. The final truth would be that if certain empirical expressions took place, certain ideal results would follow. But as we have seen, what is merely valid, is not even valid. For the Third Conception of Being failed to express how even itself could be true, just because it left us with a mere general what, and never reached the that.
Suppose, in fact, that what we have with equal propriety called the meaning and the will of our finite ​ideas now partially embodied in this flying instant, is to remain in the end unexpressed, so that only an if-proposition, valid, but disembodied, contains the truth of the world when viewed with reference to ideas. Then still you do not escape from the facts. For the fact of this non-expression of our ideas, has, by this very hypothesis, its own real Being. But what form of Being shall this fact of the non-expression of the meaning of our ideas, this refusal of the universe concretely to fulfil our purposes, actually possess? Shall this brute fact that our ideas are not expressed possess the reality of an object independent of all ideas? But such a reality, as we now know, is a logical impossibility. Moreover, an object independent of all ideas, even if such an object were otherwise possible, could defeat, or could refuse real expression to no idea whatever. For what my idea seeks, and what therefore could conceivably be refused to it, by another, is simply its own expression in just that reality which it means and intends to possess as its own object. The reality, therefore, which shall positively refuse it expression, is ipso facto the reality to which the idea itself appeals, and is not independent of this appeal. For you are not put in the wrong by a reality to which you have made no reference; and error is possible only concerning objects that we actually mean as our own objects. The object that is to defeat my partial and fragmentary will is then ipso facto my whole will, my final purpose, my total meaning determinately and definitively expressed. Hypotheses never verified, if-propositions to which no concrete expression corresponds, have part in existence of course, ​but only as fragments of ideas. They exist only as errors take place. I can be in partial error, but only because at this instant I may imperfectly grasp my own whole meaning as I refer to my object. My will, as it is now transiently embodied, can fail in any partial way of realization, but only because I now fail to be wholly aware of my own will. Therefore hypothetical propositions counter to fact are possible only as fragments. But however far I wander in the wildernesses of my temporal experience, the eternal fulfilment of my own life encompasses me. I escape not from the meshes of the net of my own will. I fail at this instant to observe this fact, merely because of the imperfection of my momentary form of human consciousness. I interpret my facts hypothetically and often falsely, in so far as I fail to grasp just now my own whole purpose.
Schopenhauer defines my world as my own will. If by my will he meant the individual embodiment and expression of the whole meaning of my ideas, he would thus be right. But then he would indeed be no pessimist. For the longing and the misery of finitude that in my present form of human consciousness now so frequently bound the horizon of my darkened instants of fragmentary experience — this longing and misery, when they beset me, I say, involve that very search for Another, that very dissatisfaction with the abstractness and dreary generality of my present ideas, which I express in my own way whenever, out of the depths, I cry after Reality. People often object to Schopenhauer’s view of the world as the will, that that doctrine, as Schopenhauer frequently expresses ​it, is a mere Animism. We know, they say, that the world is real; but how should we know that its inner Being, so foreign to ours, resembles our own will? But our own Fourth Conception of Being is not in the older sense animistic. For it does not first say, The world is known to be real, and then add, And we conjecture that this reality resembles that of our own will. What our view asserts is that the world is and can be real only as the object expressing in final, in individual form, the whole meaning which our finite will, imperfectly embodied in fleeting instants, seeks and attempts to define as its own Other, and also as precisely its own ultimate expression. In other words, the world, from our point of view, becomes real only as such an ultimate expression of our ideas. But when the sceptic here retorts, But perhaps then no world is real at all, we reply with the now several times repeated observation that the non-being of any specific object is subject to the same conditions as the Being of all things. What is not, is not, merely because our complete object, the complete expression of our whole meaning, when, in this transient moment, we speak of the thing that is not, excludes its presence. The very possibility of our ignorance and error implies the presence of the whole self-conscious truth.
II
Results in philosophy must needs lead to new problems. With this definition in mind of what it is to be, how shall we next undertake to describe that more special constitution of the world which our concept of Being involves?
The general title of our course called attention to a ​certain well-known problem for which we are now at length fully prepared. The World and the Individual, — these are now upon our hands. Their Being we have defined, not only in general, but with an explicit reference to both of them. But what we have so far, for the greater part of our discussion, deliberately ignored, is an attempt to describe in any detail their precise mutual relations. It is just to these relations that we shall hence-forth devote ourselves, both in the brief remaining space of this first half of our series, and in all that is to constitute the second half of these lectures. What is, as we have already asserted, is the World. We have also asserted that it is the Individual. Both terms appear equivocal. The world is real, — ay, but what world? The world, so our Fourth Conception has answered, — the world that any idea views as its own wholly expressed meaning and object. “Yes,” you may say, “but are not our ideas many and various? Is it not one thing to think of mathematical truth, and quite another to think of physical truth? Is not the world of the mathematician a different object from the world of the moralist? Are these not then various worlds adapted to express various meanings? Do these worlds constitute one realm, — a single universe? And if so, how?” But we have also said that the individual is real. Here still more naturally you may ask, “What individual?” Our answer has been: The whole individual life that expresses and presents the meaning of any single idea. But you will still properly be dissatisfied. You will say: “Are not the individuals as various as are all our various ideas? And how are these individuals of which you have so far spoken ​to be related to what we mean when we talk of individual men, of souls, of moral personalities, or of one man as different from any other man?”
Now these are precisely the central questions of religion. These, therefore, are the problems most significant for our whole quest. These two are issues which no one who attacks the central concepts of metaphysical doctrine ought to ignore. The unity of the world, the triumph of the divine plan, the supremacy of good in the universe, these are the interests which religion expresses by asserting that God reigns as a rational, self-conscious, world-possessing, and single Being. The freedom of individuals, the deathless meaning of the life of each person, the opportunity for moral action, these are the interests of every form of ethical religion. I have been forced, before approaching these issues, to dwell so elaborately and so long upon the concept of Being, because that concept is no abstraction, but is precisely the richest and most inclusive of all conceptions, and because, until we had grasped its meaning, any speech as to the various beings that may be found in the world, and as to their relations to the whole and to one another, would have altogether lacked metaphysical foundation. But our task having been so far accomplished, we are prepared to pass from the doctrine of what it is to be real, to the consequent theory regarding what are the existent realities. Hereupon, however, we enter upon the true task of a religious theory.
The problems just stated, if one views them in advance, appear to admit of two opposed solutions. Of these the one would lay the emphasis upon the unity of the whole ​world, while the other would insist both upon the variety, and, in some modified way, upon the relative independence of the individual lives. The one thesis could be briefly summarized thus: This Fourth Conception of Being asserts that what is, expresses, in a complete life of concrete experience, the whole meaning of the ideas that refer to any object. Now, when any one of us rationally speaks of the universe, of the whole of Being, he has an idea, and this idea means precisely the entire world itself. Whatever life pulsates anywhere, whatever meaning is at any time fragmentarily seen embodied in flying moments, — all such lives and meanings form the object of our metaphysical inquiry. Now our very power to make the whole of Being our problem, already implies that the object of our inquiry, whatever it proves to contain, has as the fulfilment of one idea, the constitution of a single life of concrete fulfilment. All varieties of individual expression are thus subordinate to the unity of the whole. All differences amongst various ideas result from and are secondary to the very presence of one universal type of ideal meaning in all the realm of life. All appearance of isolation in finite beings, all the fragmentariness of their finitude, these are indeed but aspects of the whole truth. The One is in all, and all are in the One. All meanings, if completely developed, unite in one meaning, and this it is which the real world expresses. Every idea, if fully developed, is of universal application. Since this one world of expression is a life of experience fulfilling ideas, it possesses precisely the attributes which the ages have most associated with the name of God. For God is the Absolute Being, and the perfect fulness of life. Only ​God, when thus viewed, is indeed not other than his world, but is the very life of the world taken in its wholeness as a single conscious and self-possessed life.
In God we live and move and have our Being. The other thesis, at first sight apparently opposed to the foregoing, may be stated as follows: This Fourth Conception of Being appeals, when rightly understood, to the self of each individual thinker. And it appeals to individual thinkers only, whether human or divine. We have often spoken in the foregoing of any idea as if, taken apart from other ideas, it possessed, so to speak, a selfhood of its own, the selfhood imperfectly exemplified, transiently embodied, in your consciousness at this instant while you think and purpose. Now this manner of speech might indeed be said to lay too much stress upon mere fragments. A momentary human idea is indeed not by itself alone a self, although it does fragmentarily contain the partial will of a self. But the meaning that it contains belongs in truth to some individual thinker, to this soul, to this man, to you or to me. Now, however mysterious may be the difference between you and me, we are in such wise different beings, that the unity of Being must find room for our variety. Above all, our ethical freedom, our practical, even if limited, moral independence of one another, must be preserved. The world then is a realm of individuality. Hence it must be a realm of individuals, self-possessed, morally free, and sufficiently independent of one another to make their freedom of action possible and finally significant.
These are the two possible interpretations of our Fourth Conception. It will be our attempt in what immediately ​follows, in this and in the next lecture, to develope and to reconcile both interpretations. We shall maintain that the unity of the divine life, and the universality of the divine plan, define one aspect, and a most essential aspect of the world of our Fourth Conception. We shall also maintain and try to make in general explicit, how this unity is not only consistent with the ethical meaning of finite individuality, but is also the sole and sufficient basis thereof.
Ill
The unity of the whole world, and the unversality of the idea of Being, first demand our attention. We have asserted that our Fourth Conception involves the absolute unity of the final knowing process. In precisely what sense and for what reason do we make this assertion?
Our concept of Being implies that whatever is, is consciously known as the fulfilment of some idea, and is so known either by ourselves at this moment, or by a consciousness inclusive of our own. If we address the finite thinker, and consider the implications of his knowledge, we point out to him that what he now experiences is but a fragment of the object that he means. But the object that he means, so we tell him, can have no form of Being that is independent of his meaning. Nor can he be said to have any meaning not now wholly fulfilled in his present experience, unless that very meaning is present to an insight that includes and completes his own conscious insight according to his own real intent. This essentially idealistic account of what it is to be, we have now elaborately justified by an analysis of the very concept of mean​ing, or of the relation of idea and object. If any fact, not at any instant consciously present to the finite thinker, is really meant by him, then there is something true, about his consciousness, which his momentary consciousness of his own meaning at once implies, and nevertheless in its internal meaning does not directly and wholly exhaust for him, here and now. And this relatively external truth which is intended by the finite consciousness, and which is inclusive of all that at any instant this finite consciousness finds present to itself, is a truth whose Being can be neither of the realistic type, nor of the mystical type, nor of the merely valid type of Being, nor of any form except a conscious form, — a form whose existence includes and completes what the finite thinker at any moment undertakes to know. It follows of necessity that in the world as we define it, there can exist no fact except as a known fact, as a fact present to some consciousness, namely, precisely to the consciousness that fulfils the whole meaning of whoever asserts that this fact is real.
In view of this essential feature of our finite situation as thinkers, it follows at once that the whole world of truth and being must exist only as present, in all its variety, its wealth, its relationships, its entire constitution, to the unity of a single consciousness, which includes both our own and all finite conscious meanings in one final eternally present insight. This complete insight is indeed not merely one, but is observant of all the real finite varieties, of experience, of meaning, and of life. Nor is the external insight merely timeless; but it is possessed of an inclusive view of the whole of time, and ​of whatever, when taken in its wholeness, this our time-process means. This final view, for which the realm of Being possesses the unity of a single conscious whole, indeed ignores no fragment of finite consciousness; but it sees all at once, as the realm of truth in its entirety.
This, I say, is the unquestionable and inevitable outcome of our Fourth Conception of Being. And the proof of this outcome is very brief.
For whatever is has its being, once more, only as a fact observed, and exists as the fulfilment of a conscious meaning. That is our definition of Being. But now let one say, There are many facts, ideas, and meanings in the world. Each of these exists only as the object that fulfils the whole meaning of a knowing process. So far, then, there exist many knowing processes, each with its own meaning fulfilled. The world so far contains many knowers, many ideas, or many Selves, if you are pleased to use that word. But our Fourth Conception hereupon continues: Are these many knowers mutually related or not? Answer as you will. Let them be or not be in any specific sort of mutual relation. Then this, the fact about their relations, exists, but exists only as a known fact. For our theory asserts universally that all which has Being exists only as known object. The fact about the true relations of the various knowing beings and processes is, however, a fact unintelligible except as expressing and including their own very existence; and by hypothesis this inclusive fact is a consciously known fact. That the various knowers are, then, and that they are in given relationship or in given relative independence of one another, — all this is a consciously known ​fact. There is, in consequence, a conscious act or process for which the existence and the relations of all the various knowing processes constitute a present and consciously observed truth. But this assertion, the inevitable consequence of our doctrine, implies that one final knower knows all knowing processes in one inclusive act.
Moreover, let the world of fact, taken in its wholeness, possess any constitution that you please. Assert that any degree of multiplicity, of mutual isolation, of temporal succession, of variety in individual existence, or of other dividing principle, variegates the universe, or keeps finite acts, meanings, and interests asunder. Then, by hypothesis, all this variety and mutual isolation is fact, and by our Fourth Conception of Being it all exists only as a consciously known fact. If the sundered finite forms of consciousness are by hypothesis not mutually inclusive, their very sundering, according to our conception of Being, implies their common presence as facts to a knower who consciously observes their sundering as the fulfilment of his own single meaning.
For otherwise the sundering would exist without being fully and consciously present to anybody; since, in so far as ɑ is sundered from b, there is, neither in ɑ alone nor in b alone, a consciousness of all that the sundering implies for both.
And, finally, the knower of the universe in its wholeness can possess, by our definition, no Being that is unknown to himself. For whatever is, is consciously known. And if the being of ɑ is unknown to ɑ, but is known only to another, namely, to b, there so far exists a fact, namely, the relation of ɑ and b, whose presence ​to knowledge has not yet been defined. But if whatever exists, exists only as known, the existence of knowledge itself must be a known existence, and can finally be known only to the final knower himself, who, like Aristotle’s God, is so far defined in terms of absolute self-knowledge.
Herewith the purely abstract statement of the consequences of our Fourth Conception, so far as it concerns the unity of the world, has been made, in the only form consistent with our conception. What is, is present to the insight of a single Self-conscious Knower, whose life includes all that he knows, whose meaning is wholly fulfilled in his facts, and whose self-consciousness is complete. And our reason for asserting this as the Reality lies in the now thoroughly expounded doctrine that no other conception of Being than this one can be expressed without absolute self-contradiction. Whoever denies this conception covertly, so we affirm, asserts it whenever, expressly or by implication, he talks of Being at all. For to talk of Being is to speak of fact that is either present to a consciousness or else is nothing. And from that one aspect of our definition which is involved in the thesis that whatever is, is consciously known, all the foregoing view of the unity of Being inevitably follows.
Such an abstract general statement of the results of our definition of what it is to be, may well be illustrated, however, through an approach to the whole matter of the unity of Being from another side, namely, from the more empirical side. For in conceiving of all that is as a single whole, as the life, the meaning, and the consciousness of a single Self, we are not limited to merely uni​versal considerations. Human thought has long been conscious of some aspects of the unity of Being. The world of ordinary experience, of common sense, and of science, has already its provisional unity, which our own idealism must view as a genuine, if fragmentary, hint of the final unity. Let us then next briefly study this relative unity of the empirical world. It will help to free from barren abstractions our own insight.
Our Fourth Conception of Being is through and through, in one of its aspects, an empirical conception. We derive the very idea of fulfilment and of purpose from the relative and transient fulfilment of purpose that any one of our more thoughtful conscious moments presents to us. And despite the foregoing use of abstractions, it is no part of our idealistic plan to undertake to deduce a priori any of the special facts that may exist anywhere in the universe. For our view of the that predetermines indeed the general constitution of the what, but not our power to predict, apart from experience, what nature and finite mind, what space and time, are to contain. Accordingly in reviewing the empirical world with reference to the special nature of its unity, we must once more be subject to the control of the facts of the universe as known to common sense and to science. We must frankly recognize the seeming varieties of these facts. We must look for unity only in the midst of their empirical diversity. We must see in what sense just this empirical world is to be interpreted in terms of our Fourth Conception. And, in fact, when we thus turn back to experience as our guide, the knowable universe appears a refractory object to which to apply our theory of the unity of Being. ​
IV
For, apart from the definition of the ontological predicate, the subjects of which we usually assert Being belong to certain well-known but sharply contrasted types. In the first place, we ordinarily ascribe Being to nature, to the physical world so far as it is contemporaneous with ourselves. We say this whole present physical world now is. We regard this world as a peculiarly concrete instance of what it is to be. And in particular Realism often prefers present natural objects as its instances of Being. This natural realm is spread out before us in space, and appears to be of an infinitely wealthy variety of constitution. In the second place, we ascribe Being to our fellow-men, and, in particular, to their conscious inner lives as beings that possess or that are minds. This social realm is also one that we may call a second region of concrete fact. In the third place, and in a very notable way, we also attribute reality to the whole world of past events. We may say indeed that the past is not now, or that it no longer is. But we may say with equal assurance that the past has a genuine and irrevocable constitution, and that assertions now made about the past are at present true or false. In fact, true and false witness in most practical matters relates in general to the past. We moreover make the past a region for historical research; or, as in the case of geology, we regard past events as the topics of a strictly inductive and very elaborate natural science whose work is done in the present. So the past is for us a very genuine being. Our knowledge and interpretation of the present world, ​whether human or physical, is furthermore based upon our views as to the nature of these past events. For the present world consists for us of observed or assumed facts, defined and interpreted in the light of presupposed happenings. Any given present object, for instance, is seen to be this or this object, because we recognize it as identical in character with a fact supposed to have been known in the past. In the main, present Being is thus for us, so to speak, past Being warmed over. There is nothing that we regard as now real unless by virtue of the express or implied judgment that, since in the past this or that has existed, this or that present existence may in consequence be assumed or accepted as a continuation or as an outcome of the realm of past Being. Leave out the realm of the past from our conception of the real world, and our empirical universe at this instant would shrivel, for us, into a mere collection of almost uninterpreted sensations. The world as it is just now has for us Being as a supplement to the world that has been. We shall still further see, in a moment, how manifold are the illustrations of this truth.
In the next place, however, we ascribe, although with a decidedly different emphasis, a form of Being to the future, and to all that is therein to happen. The future, we indeed say, is not yet. But present assertions about the future are, even now, and despite a well-known remark of Aristotle’s, either true or false, and that quite apart from any theory as to fate, or chance, or freedom. A coming eclipse in any given year is regarded by an astronomer as reality, when he adjusts himself to its Being by preparing an expedition to observe that eclipse. Again, it is now ​true either that I shall be alive a year from now or that I shall not be alive. Life insurance is a provision made to meet future facts that are regarded as realities, and that are respected accordingly. Future Being is thus the familiar object of hope and fear, of common sense prudence, as well as of predictive science. Omit the future from your scheme of Being, and your world loses all its practical human interest. To be sure, the future, unlike the past, is not regarded as irrevocable, and a believer in freedom thinks the future partly contingent. But even the contingent future event has its Being. Wait, namely, and you shall find out what that Being is, while even now the principle of contradiction applies to assertions about it. Suppose a judge endowed with free will, and deliberating as to the fate of a prisoner left to his judicial discretion. While the prisoner awaits the judge’s decision, the fact awaited is supposed by this hypothesis to be a contingent fact. But is not the prisoner anxiously expecting his own discovery of the Being of that very fact? And while he waits, is he dealing with a mere fancy or dream, or a baseless unreality? No, the dreaded decision, although future, and by this hypothesis contingent, is a fact, and has Being; and that is why one awaits its announcement with such concern.
Present Being of two sorts, namely in nature and in minds, Past and Future Being, these four types of reality we have now enumerated as types recognized by common sense and natural science. Our study of the Third Conception of Being, some time since, made us familiar with the still different sort of reality ordinarily attributed to the realm of moral and of mathematical truth. This ​realm of eternal validity common sense as well as science recognizes; and as we further saw, when we dealt with our Third Conception, the more transient world of prices, of credits, of social standing, and of institutional existence, is likewise for common sense a realm of true Being, yet a realm neither identical with nature, nor capable of being reduced to the contents present within any number of individual human minds. We have abandoned the Third Conception. But our new conception must find room for the typical instances of Being of the third type, namely, for the mathematical objects, for the socially and morally valid beings. And now, finally, after surveying all these so various types of beings, we have to recall the comment often already made in these lectures, and to assert that not only these different kinds of realities, but also the concrete experiences whereby we come to observe, and the ideas whereby we ourselves define, describe, and in general undertake to know these very objects, are themselves also in their own measure real, and are as truly real as are the various finite objects of common sense that we know.
Now our Fourth Conception of Being, if it is to be adequate to the demands of common sense, must be adjusted to at least all of these varied types of beings. Nature, and the minds of our fellows, together with the contents of these minds, the past and the future beings and events, the eternally and transiently valid truths, and our own experiences and ideas which have all these different sorts of Being for their objects, — all these apparent facts either must be alike comprehended within our final definition of what it is to be, or else must be deliberately ​explained away as illusory instances, as mere appearances that have no true Being. But whether accepted or explained away, these sorts of beings must at all events be taken into account in attempting to define reality.
V
If, looking over the broad field suggested by the foregoing list of the sorts of beings recognized by ordinary human belief, we thereupon attempt to reduce to unity the characters possessed by these supposed objects in so far as they are said to be real, our next impression may be once more that, despite our Fourth Conception, the Being which the various classes of facts have in common can only be something extremely abstract and barren. If the past, say yesterday, or the Silurian period, has Being in some irrevocable sense, despite the fact that we also say, It no longer is, what has such a past in common with the present, except that each belongs to time? And have both past and present Being any less abstract character than this in common with the future, say with the coming history of Europe five centuries hence? Of that coming history we say, It is not yet. If in a sense it still has Being, because it also is even now the object of possible true or false assertions, has this type of Being still anything but the name in common with the past or with the present? Or again, if one compares the existence which the mathematician attributes to the roots of an equation of the nth degree, or to the irrational numbers and differential coefficients, with the existence that you now ascribe to your friend's mind, when you converse with him, — in what but the name do these types of Being ​resemble each other or the foregoing types. And finally, when you say, both of your own warm present inner experience, and of to-day’s price of wheat in Chicago or London, that these two have alike real Being, or when you add that the British Constitution is also a reality, is the ontological predicate applied to these different objects in anything like the same sense? And so does it not seem that, as the scholastics would have said, or as Aristotle himself remarked, Being, despite our Fourth Conception, persists in remaining an essentially equivocal word? Only, to us, at the present point reached in these lectures — to us who are no longer realists and who no longer love barren abstractions, the equivocation seems so great as to be altogether hopeless? We were to find unity. But are not the facts once more against us?
So much then merely for an impression as regards the hopelessness of any one final and still empirical unification of Being. But, on the other hand, if you look closer, does it not soon become afresh evident that all these various forms are indeed but mere variations of a single theme, mere differentiations of one idea, whose unity and universality remain indivisible amidst all its vicissitudes?
For, consider: What did we just observe about past and present? Attempt to abstract from any reference to past Being, and what becomes of any concrete notion of present Being? Where are you now? In this city, in this room, aware of yourself as this person? But if I ask you not merely how you know all this to be really so, but what you mean by these various expressions, you at once refer me to the past, not merely for your warrant, ​but even for your very meaning. This city exists for you only as the recognized city, that is familiar to you because it has long been here. In itself, apart from just your private recognition, it is what it has become. It is the outcome of former stages of its existence. This University is the living presence, in newly developed and growing form, of its own historic past. That is what the present University means. Its present is inseparable from its past. You too are yourself because at this instant you relate yourself to your own past. The meaning of the past is a necessity, if you are to give to your present any rational meaning. Nor is this true alone of your knowledge about yourself. It is true of the very Being that you attribute to your present facts. However rapidly any Being grows, its very growth means relation to its own earlier Being. And no recondite discussion of the supposed permanence of substance is in the least needed to remind you, even if you wholly abstract from the traditional doctrines of substance, that whatever novelties the present may contain, these very novelties get their character, both for you, and for any one to whom they are real at all, by virtue of their relation to past beings and events, so that if, per impossibile, the whole past of temporal Being were absolutely stricken out, the present, which would then involve no historical relations to the foregoing, no entrance of novelty into the old order, no growth, no decay, no endurance, and no continuance of a former process in new forms, would simply lose every element that now gives it rational coherence.
Far then from being merely contrasted with present Reality, past Reality, viewed in general, is a correlated ​region of that very whole of temporal existence in which alone the present itself has any comprehensible place or even any conceivable Being. Nor can any fact of nature, however remote from us it now seems, be viewed by us as real without being caught in the net of this universal time-order.
But just so the future, not, indeed, when viewed as to its unknown details, but when conceived as the region into which the present is passing away, when regarded as containing the goal of all our hopes, and the decision of all our cherished interests and destinies, — is not this future so bound up in one world of Being with the present, that, if we could indeed abstract from future Being, present Being would again lose not only all of its practical interest, but also a large part of its theoretical meaning? Observe any object that you please, in a world of time and change, and the question, What is it? is in fact logically and inseparably bound up with the two questions, What was it? and Whither is it tending? Consider so abstract an object as the position of a material particle in space, as studied in dynamics. That position so studied becomes at once a place in a path, meaningless except as viewed with reference to the past and future positions of the particle under the system of forces acting upon it. For the theory of heat, the present temperature of a cooling body, is a state in a series of past and future states, determined by the laws of the conduction of heat. And in human affairs, just as present history is an outcome of former ages, precisely so it is a prelude to a future. And when we say that a youth, or a nation, has a future, has a destiny, we refer to an ​aspect of the being in question that we regard as a very real aspect. The assertion, The soul is immortal, is again an assertion about the supposed real Being of the soul. It has a reference to the present Being of this soul, yet it is ipso facto an assertion about the future. And common sense asks the question, Do you believe that there is a future life? Plainly all such expressions regard future Being as a reality, and inseparable from the present.
Yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, the past, the present, the future, and all the ages, thus enter the realm of conceived temporal Being together. So surely as time is, they all alike are. Their sequence is the actuality of the temporal order. Ignorant as you are of the detailed facts of any of them, you still have to say that temporal Being, in its wholeness, has to be conceived as logically coherent, and is not without all of them alike. If the future is for you uncertain, much of what you regard as the present is uncertain also, and the same is true of the past. These three sorts of Being, then, are not to be sundered. They are merely distinguishable aspects of one conception. The illusion that they are separable arises only when you neglect both their continuity, and that coherence of meaning which forces you constantly to see in the lines of your friend’s face his past reflected, in your own memories your very self expressed, and in your future the continuation and expression of the present Being of your will. And once more this temporal unity applies to the whole of nature. In one time all events are conceived as occurring.
As to possible, or valid, Being, — we already saw, in our former discussion, how impossible it is to separate ​that type of Being from the concrete present experience in terms of which you define it, or from the past experience, whose laws you expect to find repeated when you define physical possibilities. If you write down an equation, and prove its properties, or demonstrate that it has roots, you actually deal with presented symbols and diagrams, with calculations whose outcome you now observe; in brief, with data of experience here and now. If you somehow extend into infinity the valid meaning of these present experiences, your right to do this involves the unity of your present mathematical experience with the whole realm of reality to which you refer. And if you define a physical possibility, such as the possible freezing of a given body of water, or the possible observations of a coming eclipse, you presuppose that certain laws of past experience and of past Being will hold valid in the future; and by virtue of this relation only can you undertake to say of the possible physical experience, It is valid.
Validity then, if one rightly affirms it at all, is a type of Being absolutely bound up with the Being of present, of past, and of future experience. Its Being is even for common sense one with their Being.
Despite all the contrasts of even the world of common sense, we deal so far then with one conceived infinitely complex whole, whose Being is of one inclusive type, though differentiated into various types.
The kind of Being that we ascribe to the minds of our human fellows remains to be here very briefly considered. As a fact, and as we shall later see more in detail, when we come to the problems of the second half of the present ​course of lectures, the Being of my fellow, in general, is, for me, inseparable from my idea of my own Being. As an essentially social creature, I have no rational and self-conscious life for myself, except by virtue of literal and ideal contrasts, and other social relationships, with men whom I conceive as my fellows. I can indeed change or spare very many present relations to other men without losing myself. I can live in the memory of past social intercourse. I can enjoy rational communion with ideal, or at all events with unseen, comrades, as children, as poets, and as many wise souls do; but if you suppose me even in memory and in fancy as well as in fact absolutely solitary, I should lose my very consciousness of my own meaning as this person living in this world. My whole Being then is bound up with my ideas of my real and ideal and unseen fellows, of their esteem or rivalry, of the tasks that they set me to do, of my office as their comrade, opponent, rival, enemy, friend, or servant, — in brief, — of their relations to me.
It follows that their Being also is inseparably bound up, for me, with my notion, not only of my present self, but of the past, present, future, and possible world that I regard as real.
And now, if, with this whole series of considerations in mind, we survey once more the types of objects to which we ascribe Being, we find that the very conception of the various types of Being which we first distinguished, demands, even upon purely empirical grounds, their reunion in one whole conception of what it is to be real. For what we have discovered is not merely that various objects are in physical or in moral ways connected in the ​real world, although this is universally true, but that the fundamental fashions of Being themselves which we ascribe to objects, such fashions as are exemplified by past, present, future, determinately possible, or mentally real Being, are, just as ways of possessing reality, logically inseparable, so that we cannot abandon one of these fashions of Being as illusory, without at once abandoning them all, and surrendering, like the mystic, all of our finite distinctions as mere dreams. Thus our world, however many and various its objects, possesses what we may call Ontological Unity, in so far as all its types of Being, concrete and abstract, appear as various aspects of one type of Being. Nor can you sunder any single idea of an isolated real object from the network established by ideas of reality in general. The whole of this world stands or falls together.
Considerations of this sort are by no means stated in ultimate form, for they have been based upon a provisional acceptance of the world of common sense, with all of its classes of facts. Yet only by such provisional acceptance can we get before us the facts of the empirical world ready for criticism. What we now see is that all our human ideas of real Beings form portions of a single system. All varieties of individuals and of individual ideas must be subordinate to the unity of this system.
VI
Our criticism of the constitution of this system, as we men conceive it can be made, for present purposes, very summary. We have no right to limit the constitution of universal life by the categories of human experience ​taken merely as human experience. The very meaning of our own ideas regarding the interpretation of nature will be found, in our later cosmological discussions, to involve the thesis that the realm called our own finite experience is only, so to speak, a very special case of an universal type. When the modern doctrine of evolution regards man as a product and outcome of nature, our own view of the universe will in the end have to accept the extremely subordinate place that this empirical doctrine assigns to the finite being called man amongst the beings that people nature. Our cosmology must not be anthropocentric in any special sense. There is, indeed, a sense, in which, according to our view, any rational idea in the whole universe seeks and in its complete development finds, as the expression of its ultimate meaning, the whole of the universe. But we have no right whatever to regard man as the only finite being whose ideas are rational. On the contrary, as we shall see in the second half of the present course, there is no possibility of giving any unity to the inner meaning of human existence without regarding man as a single group only in a vast society of finite beings, whose relationships, although very faintly hinted to us in our experience of natural phenomena, are as concrete and significant as any rational relationships can be. It is precisely in the history of the process called evolution that we have some indication of the type of these extra-human relationships amongst the finite beings who are present in the world in the same sense in which we are present.
In consequence of such aspects of the natural order, I should accordingly reject as inadequate the fashion of ​dealing with nature, and with the universal categories of finite experience, which was most characteristic of the forms of Idealism prevalent in Germany in the early part of this century. Our historical indebtedness to those forms of Idealism for our Fourth Conception of Being has been obvious all along, and needs here have no explicit confession. On the other hand, the application of this conception to the theory of nature, both by Schelling and by Hegel, seems to me to have been as far astray as a larger minded modern philosophical doctrine can be. It is not so much that this earlier idealistic philosophy of nature was founded upon a priori methods, and disregarded the special sciences; for as a fact the Naturphilosophie both of the Schellingian and of the Hegelian schools derived many, perhaps most of its special principles, from the text-books of science then current; and its use of experience, if capricious and fragmentary, was in general intended to be serious. But the essential principles of the application of idealistic conceptions of the unity of Being to the interpretation of nature were, in those systems, false, because a disposition to arrange the sciences in an arbitrarily defined hierarchy, to divide nature into sharply contrasted regions, celestial and terrestrial, inorganic and organic, extra-human and human, predetermined all the speculative interpretations attempted. We now know that the special sciences form no mere hierarchy; that organic and inorganic nature, however divided they may be, are also very profoundly linked. We know that the ancient contrasts between terrestial and celestial physical processes and substances appear, the farther we go in the study of nature, the less significant. We know ​that the unity which the evolutionary processes indicate is one that no simple scheme of the formal classification of natural processes into mechanical, chemical, and organic, or even into those of living and non-living nature, can any longer attempt at all exhaustively to characterize.
So much the more must an idealist to-day be unwilling to talk of nature as coming for the first time to self-consciousness in man, or to limit the categories in terms of which nature is to be interpreted, to those which are found directly serviceable in the human process of cataloguing and describing the natural phenomena which come within our finite ken. The older philosophy of nature was not merely too much disposed to anticipate scientific results in an a priori way; it was also too crudely and anthropocentrically empirical in its classifications of natural fact, and in its attempts to unify natural fact. Our doctrine, indeed, invites man to be at home in his universe, but does not make man, in so far as you first separate him from nature, the one finite end that nature seeks.
For us to-day, as I may as well forthwith assert, the conceptions which, from our idealistic point of view, promise to admit of the most plastic adaptation to the varieties of empirical fact, and consequently of the most universal application to the interpretation of the inner life of nature, are our social conceptions. These at once are intensely human, and capable, as Kant’s ethical doctrine already showed, of a vast extra-human generalization, in so far as we take account of other possible moral agents. In the form of finite social intercourse, amongst human beings, we find exemplified a type of unity in ​variety, and of variety recalling us always to the recognition of unity, — a type, I say, which permits us, as I believe, to go further in our hypotheses for the interpretation of the vast finite realm called nature, than we can go by the use of any other types of conception. The social life finds room for the most various sorts of mutual estrangement, conflict, and misunderstanding amongst finite beings; while, on the other hand, every form of social intercourse implies an ultimate unity of meaning, a real connectedness of inner life, which is precisely of the type that you can best hope to explain in terms of our Fourth Conception of Being. When I tell you then, in advance, that in the second series of these lectures I shall try to explain our relations to nature as essentially social, and therefore in their deepest essence ethical relationships; when I predict that, without transcending our legitimate rights as interpreters of the empirical results, we shall undertake to show that nature, in a fashion whose details are still only faintly hinted to us men, constitutes a vast society, in whose transactions finite processes of evolution when viewed, not with reference to the eternal meaning of the whole, but with reference to the temporal series of facts, are presumably mere passing incidents, — when I say this, I indicate in some measure how our Idealism will undertake to explain the unity of the world, without becoming, upon that account, merely anthropocentric in its accounts of nature.
There is a sense, as I have said, in which all the world may be viewed as centred about the fully expressed inner meaning of any finite rational idea. But then human ideas, as in fact is implied in their very conscious sense of ​their own meaning, are not the only ideas of which this can be asserted. It is not until man views himself as a member of an universal society, whose temporal estrangements are merely incidental to their final unity of meaning, that man rationally appreciates the actual sense of the conscious ideas that express his longing for oneness with an absolute life. We are related to God through our consciousness of our fellows. And our fellows, in the end, prove to be far more various than the mere men. It is one office of philosophy to cultivate this deeper sense of companionship with the world. And precisely in this sense of deeper comradeship with nature will lie the future reconciliation of religion and science.
VII
And so, when we speak of the final unity of the world-life, we have no right to define that unity merely in terms of the special categories of the distinctively human type of consciousness. Our foregoing sketch of the manner in which, for us men, present, past, future, physical, mental, mathematical, and moral reality seem to be linked in a single system, is not therefore by itself a sufficient basis for stating the way in which the whole meaning of reality gets presented to the single unity of the consciousness that we have already called divine.
On the other hand, the very essence of our Idealism lies in asserting that just in so far as you have become conscious, not of a merely abstract form of possible unity, but of a sense in which your experience already unites many in one, you have become acquainted with a fact which the ​ultimate nature of the divine plan may, and in general does, vastly transcend, but simply cannot ignore. Your truth from the absolute point of view will appear, indeed, as a partial truth, but not upon that account as untrue. The interesting doctrine of the “Degrees of Truth and Reality” which Mr. Bradley has lately developed afresh, although, as I think, Mr. Bradley has given this doctrine too negative a form, remains upon its positive side, the common property of all the synthetic forms of post-Kantian Idealism. Recognizing, as of course I distinctly do, the close historical relation of what I am saying to the whole tradition of recent Idealism, I can only point out here that our human interpretation of the unity of Being, however much it may be supplemented, in however different a light it may appear from some higher point of view, remains, in its own relative degree, true, just in so far as it is at once an assertion of unity, and a concrete illustration of that unity by facts found somewhere within the realm of man's actual experience. An abstractly immediate experience of unity, such as the mystic sought, may remain either barren, or a mere prophecy of some more philosophical doctrine. A hasty account of the unity of nature, such as Aristotle's system founded upon the optical illusion of the rotation of the outermost heaven about the earth, is already more concrete in its unification of many natural phenomena in a single scheme. It has been superseded, but only by a science whose natural phenomena are seen to be in still more significant and deeper relations. Our own present largest generalization, which unites the things and processes of nature and mind in one in the way just indicated, may need very real correction ​from an absolute point of view. Yet this preliminary unification has its truth.
In particular, however, as to the special features of our view of nature, our human experience of space-relations is obviously so special in its type that this our view of the space-world may be frankly regarded, I think, as something of decidedly limited truth. It is fairly inconceivable that from the point of view of experience in general, our space-form should remain as more than a fragmentary perspective effect, so to speak, or in other words, as more than what one might call a relatively valid finite point of view. The facts which we view as related to one another in space must indeed be viewed by a larger experience than ours, as present and as linked. But our way of interpreting the linkage is obviously human, and is probably only a very special case of the experience of the various aspects of coexistent meaning in the world of the final experience.
In another way, while time as the form of ethically significant process has doubtless a far deeper truth, temporal succession is subject to a perfectly arbitrary limitation of what one may call the time-span of our human consciousness. What we regard as a present instant is neither a truly instantaneous mere Now, having no finite length, nor a duration long enough to enable us to survey at a glance anywhere nearly as considerable a whole of successively realized meaning as we desire for any one of our more rational human purposes, whether thoughtful, or artistic, or practical. Our human time-consciousness is essentially ill adapted for observing the whole of any one of even our most familiar meanings. In other words, for us men, ​“the present instant,” so-called, has at once temporal succession, the earlier and the later, included within it, and it has a decidedly, and, in fact, a very inconveniently and arbitrarily, limited length. What happens so rapidly or so slowly that we fail to accommodate to the events our ability to take note of the succession as a present and given fact, all such too rapid or too slow series of occurrences, we fail directly to note as matters of clear consciousness. Hence, we constantly lose sight even of our own trains of thought and action, even in instances where we most want to survey them. Our brief, but still by no means indefinitely small time-span of consciousness, determines in this way our whole human form of experience, and of course limits the ethical meaning of our conduct. Yet how long a temporal period, how much duration, shall constitute the finite interval viewed by a given form of consciousness as a now, is a wholly arbitrary matter, so long as now means not the ideal mathematical now, — the negation of all duration, the mere point between present and future, but rather a period, a succession of events, a finite duration. In our consciousness, however, the now of experience does mean just such an actual, brief, but still finite, interval or period of time, within which and during which events succeed one after another. Now nobody can for an instant defend the rationality of supposing that every possible form of consciousness must have the precise human limitation of time-span. Yet a notable alteration of time-span, quite apart from any alteration of the contents that succeed one after another in the minds in question, would constitute a variation of a given type of consciousness whose vast possible meaning, ​both psychological and ethical, it is almost impossible to estimate. A consciousness for which events that happened within a millionth of a second constituted a definite and observable serial succession of present facts, or, on the other hand, a consciousness for which the events occurring during a thousand years were as much present at once, to a single glance at temporal succession, as are now, to us, the successions that, while not too rapid, occur within a time-span of two seconds, — either one of these types of consciousness would have a profoundly different basis for estimating the significance of any given empirical facts of succession. The acts of moral agents whose consciousness thus differed from ours would have a vastly different meaning from our own.
Our idea of what it is to be conscious is therefore, logically speaking, an extremely variable idea. But for that very reason, our Fourth Conception of Being, while it certainly cannot be applied to the effort to conceive the empirical world in unity, without a full recognition of possible variations of the form of consciousnesss, has all the more freedom in undertaking the general task of viewing, as fragmentary aspects of one whole meaning, the varieties of nature and of finite individuality. For it is precisely the wholeness, and not the mere fragmentariness, the presence, and not the mere absence of unity in our consciousness, the relative attainment, and not the mere postponement of our meanings, which, from this point of view, guides us towards a positive view of how the unity of Being is, in the midst of all the varieties, attained. How in detail the final unity is won, what categories precisely ​determine the relations of its various contents, what contents supplement our own and provide for the final enrichment of the Absolute Life, — all this we of course cannot predetermine. Yet what our conception maintains is simply this: —
Survey our life, consider our experience. Look at nature as we men find it. Take account of our temporal and spatial universe. Review the results of our science. In all this you will discover manifold meanings relatively obtained, manifold interrelationships binding together facts that at first sight appear sundered, universality predetermining what had seemed accidental, and a vast fundamental ontological unity linking in its deathless embrace past, present, future, and what for us seem to be the merely possible forms of Being. Man you shall find dependent for his moral personality upon his fellows, upon nature as a whole for his evolution, and upon his own ideas, poor and finite and fleeting although they are, for his very consciousness of his relation to the universe.
Well, now, in addition to all these glimpses of unity, you shall see, too, countless signs of fragmentariness, countless seemingly chaotic varieties. We know the formula for dealing with all these in the light of our conception. These are precisely the facts whose fragmentariness sends us to Another for the explanation, yes, for our very idea of any one of them. But just such cases show themselves hereby as instances of universal principles, whose concrete meaning is not yet empirically present to us at this instant. Wherever we question, we have ideas, but not yet an experience of ​their objects. Wherever experience contains the fulfilment of a meaning, the answer to a question, the attainment of an empirical unity, there we have so far present an objective content, a plan relatively fulfilled; and precisely such unities, however much they may be supplemented, cannot be ignored in the final unity of the whole of experience.
And so, recognizing as we do the limitations of our consciousness, we now see what can guide us towards a concrete definition of the absolute form of consciousness. Here our general concept of Being gives us our test of truth, but our experience shows us special ways in which facts not only can be unified, but are unified. These ways, as far as they go, are for us valid guides. Thus, then, our general and relatively a priori proof of the unity of Being, in the early part of this lecture, has itself been brought into unity with the empirical view of our real world. We see then how the world of our Fourth Conception must be One. We catch also a glimpse of how it is One.
VIII
In sum, then, as to the most general form of the absolute unity, our guide is inevitably the type of empirical unity present in our own passing consciousness, precisely in so far as it has relative wholeness, and is rational. If one asks, “How should the many be one, and how should the whole take on the form of variety?” I answer, “Look within. You may grasp many facts at once; and when you have even the most fragmentary idea, your one purpose is here and now partially em​bodied in a presented succession of empirical facts.” If you ask, “But how can many different ideal processes be united in the unity of a single idea?” I answer, “That is precisely what in your own way you can observe whenever you think, however fragmentarily, of the various, and often highly contrasting, ideas that occur to your mind when you grasp the meaning of any hypothetical or complex proposition, — such as the present one.” If you ask, “But how can what we men call present and future Being be unified in a single present unity of consciousness?” I reply, “In idea you unify them all, whenever you yourself assert propositions as now true of past, present, and future. In concrete experience, you find a past, a present, a future, unified even in your own passing moments of consciousness, despite their brief span. As you listen to my words, several words come to consciousness at once, and yet as a succession. The first of three words is past when the second sounds, the third is yet to come when the second sounds, yet all are at once for you. Now this totum simul is precisely the character that, within your brief time-span of human consciousness, you can and do now verify. An eternal consciousness is definable as one for which all the facts of the whole time-stream, just so far as time is a final form of consciousness, have the same type of unity that your present momentary consciousness, even now within its little span, surveys. But if for the divine mind, some still more inclusive form takes up our time-stream into a yet larger unity of experience, all the more is what we mean by temporal succession present together for the ​Absolute Experience. Nor does this mean that at this, your present human and temporal instant, at this hour of the clock, the divine and final moment of consciousness has just now the future and the past before it at a glance. For your own grasp of the contents of your passing instant of consciousness faces at once a series of successive events, but also does not therefore bring before your insight all the successive contents of any present moment at any one temporal point within that present moment. What your own passing consciousness is to grasp at once, within the range of its own time-span, consists of facts which are successive one to another. Now our assertion is that precisely such a grasp of successive facts in one unity of consciousness is characteristic of the Absolute Consciousness in its relation to the whole of time, precisely in so far as the temporal form of realization is valid at all. And that this temporal form has its place in the final unity we know, just because time is for us the conditio sine qua non of all ethical significance.
The case of temporal unity is typical of every instance of the application of our Fourth Conception. In so far as your ideas now possess internal meaning, you grasp Many in One. You do not therefore lose the many in the unity, any more than you lose the notes in the melody. Ethical meanings do not involve the mere blending of details in a single whole. Rational insight wins unity only through variety.
And now what our Fourth Conception asserts is that God’s life, for God’s life we must now call this absolute fulfilment which our Fourth Conception defines, sees the one plan fulfilled through all the manifold lives, the single ​consciousness winning its purpose by virtue of all the ideas, of all the individual selves, and of all the lives. No finite view is wholly illusory. Every finite intent taken precisely in its wholeness is fulfilled in the Absolute. The least life is not neglected, the most fleeting act is a recognized part of the world's meaning. You are for the divine view all that you now know yourself at this instant to be. But you are also infinitely more. The preciousness of your present purposes to yourself is only a hint of that preciousness which in the end links their meaning to the entire realm of Being.
And despite the vastness, the variety, the thrilling complexity of the life of the finite world, the ultimate unity is not far from any one of us. All variety of idea and object is subject, as we have seen, to the unity of the purpose wherein we alone live. Even at this moment, yes, even if we transiently forget the fact, we mean the Absolute. We win the presence of God when most we flee. We have no other dwelling-place but the single unity of the divine consciousness. In the light of the eternal we are manifest, and even this very passing instant pulsates with a life that all the worlds are needed to express. In vain would we wander in the darkness; we are eternally at home in God.