PART II
THE CONCEPTION OF WILL AND ITS RELATION TO THE ABSOLUTE
In the foregoing discussion, as well as in my original paper, a theory of the Absolute has been defined whose essence can now be briefly restated thus: Our experience, as it comes, is essentially fragmentary. This fragmentariness is not an accidental defect of an experience such as is ours. It is an essential defect of all finite experience. In other words, you cannot suppose our experience, as it is, to be, or to contain, the whole of what we refer to when we speak of the real, unless you are willing to fall prey to a logical contradiction.
A sceptic might indeed be supposed to say: “What I now and here immediately experience may be the whole of reality.” But such a sceptic, if he tries to state this view coherently, finds the hypothesis in question simply contradictory. For what he means may be, first, the well-known assertion: “I can mean to refer, in genuine truth, to no object except what is now present to me as the object here meant. Hence I can never really think, much less verify the thought, of an object beyond, i.e. not now present to me.” But hereupon we at once reply to the sceptic, that in raising his question he already
