Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/380

yond, and that still, in its totality, has aspects which, relatively speaking, refute and transcend your idea. How, upon our idealistic basis, is such finite error possible? I answer: Only by virtue of the fact that the world, which well knows and includes your idea, and which fulfils all valid ideas, fails to fulfil your idea just in so far as your finite idea is a part, a fragment, — a mere shred, it may be, — of a more inclusive and more significant total Idea, which in its wholeness transcends your idea, but includes it, and transcends it only by including it. The truth is truth because it includes and fulfils whatever was positively significant about your idea, by actually fulfilling an idea, that, as inclusive idea, is more significant, is richer, is larger, than yours. The fulfilment of the richer idea may involve what you now call the relative defeat of the less significant idea. Actually, then, while there is error, there is never any absolute or total error believed by anybody. The truth includes all that the illusion meant, and more too. Hence the special and fragmentary meaning of the illusory consciousness may be refuted, but the positive significance of it is kept; just as a man of heroic nature who is morally successful in the midst of a long life of commonplace trials may fulfil the spirit of the illusory hopes of his ignorant youthful ardour, not by the deeds that his boyish imagination painted, but by the endurance that more than accomplishes, in the sight of God, such tasks as his early dreams had defined in their own falsely coloured fashion. Just so, in an ideal world, all quests, as we said before, are fulfilled; and all others,