Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/245

tary. The Whole of Reality is, as such, the “Same Object,” whoever in the finite world thinks of it, or, for that matter, of anything. There is no other object but this. This at once implies a certain well-known constitution, both for the finite world of thought in its relation to objects and for the world of experience viewed in its character as a whole of immediate fact. This constitution, expressed in terms of pure thought, is defined by the thesis that all possible ideas, since they refer, consciously or unconsciously, to the same object, form a System, and a single system; and that the Absolute, in so far as it is Absolute Thought, has this system of ideas present to it. In other words, all possible thoughts, taken together, form what the mathematicians call a single Group. The concept of the Group, in modern mathematics, precisely corresponds, in particular instances, to the idealist’s conception of the Total System of possible thoughts. A Group is a system of ideal objects such that, by a definite constructive process, you can proceed from any member of the Group to any other, while this process, if exhaustively carried out, defines all possible objects that fall within the Group. Thus the members of the Group form, as it were, an ideal body; as, for instance, in case of the numbers, a definite Group of them, defined by a given constructive process of the nature indicated, would be called a Zahlkörper, or Body of Numbers, in the terminology of certain mathematicians. Well, just so, for the idealist, all the logically possible ideas form such a Group, a system of interrelated members, all referring to the one Ultimate Object, viz., the Whole of