perience. This Absolute Experience is related to our experience as an organic whole to its own fragments. It is an experience which finds fulfilled all that the completest thought can rationally conceive as genuinely possible. Herein lies its definition as an Absolute. For the Absolute Experience, as for ours, there are data, contents, facts. But these data, these contents, express, for the Absolute Experience, its own meaning, its thought, its ideas. Contents beyond these that it possesses, the Absolute Experience knows to be, in genuine truth, impossible. Hence its contents are indeed particular, — a selection from the world of bare or merely conceptual possibilities, — but they form a self-determined whole, than which nothing completer, more organic, more fulfilled, more transparent, or more complete in meaning, is concretely or genuinely possible. On the other hand, these contents are not foreign to those of our finite experience, but are inclusive of them in the unity of one life.
IX
THIS CONCEPTION OF GOD IN ITS RELATIONS TO HISTORIC PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
The conception now reached I regard as the philosophical conception of God. Some of you may observe that in the foregoing account I have often, in defining the Absolute, made use of the terms lately employed by Mr. Bradley,[1] rather than of the
- ↑ F. H. Bradley: Appearance and Reality. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1893.
