Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/208

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SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY BY PROFESSOR ROYCE
171

fessor Howison that there is another aspect to the world, in addition to the aspect upon which I have so far laid stress in this review. That the Absolute Experience is organically linked with an absolute Will and Love; that the contents of this Experience are not only facts, but chosen fulfilments of ideals; and that individuals are not only facts of the Absolute Experience, but expressions, embodiments, cases, — forms, if you will, — of the Absolute Love itself; all this I shall hereafter have occasion to consider. But here I am considering the world of fact in so far as it is fact, not in so far as it has value, or expresses the divine Will. And I insist that, viewed merely as fact, Individuality logically resembles any other fact, and that the real variety of individuals logically presupposes and depends upon the unity of the Absolute Experience, precisely as does any other real fact. Ethical Realism must stand or fall, just like other Realism; namely, as a relatively true, but fragmentary, expression of what an Absolute Idealism alone can express in truth.


V

THE THIRD ARGUMENT FOR REALISM: TRANSITION TO ABSOLUTE IDEALISM

I now pass to the last of the realist’s three arguments. Ignoring both the contents of the foregoing discussion and the conclusions which we have drawn from it, the realist may now insist upon another aspect of our ordinary experience, as implying the existence of transcendent objects beyond experience.