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THE CONCEPTION OF GOD

which ours is a fragment. The intimacy of the relation of our fragmentary experience to this total experience is indicated by the way in which our experience implies that total.

Thus the second argument of our realist is of actual service to the idealistic cause. The realist asserts that when one says: “A given experience is possible, but not here presented,” one inevitably holds that there is fact, both beyond the range of the fragmentary experience that is here and now present, and beyond the range of the bare assertion of the possibility itself. The realist is right. On the other hand, the half-idealist of our first statement of the case is right in maintaining that as soon as you define the beyond, and tell what you mean by it, you cannot make its nature incongruous with the conception “content of experience,” present or possible. The solution of the antinomy lies in asserting that the beyond is itself content of an actual experience, the experience to which the beyond is presented being in such intimate relation to the experience which asserts the possibility, that both must be viewed as aspects of one whole, fragments of one organisation. The realist, in so far as he is opposed to the half-idealist, is merely a thoroughgoing idealist who does not know his own mind. He rejects bare possibilities, in favour of something beyond them which is their ground. He is right. Only, this beyond is the Concrete Whole of an Absolute Experience, wherein the thoughts of all the possibilities of experience get their right interpretation, their just confirmation, or their refutation, — in a word, their fulfilment.