Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/82

terms used in either of my two published discussions of the topic, i.e. either in the book that you have been studying or in my Spirit of Modern Philosophy. Such variation of the terms employed involves indeed an enrichment, but certainly no essential change in the conception. The argument here used is essentially the same as the one before employed. You can certainly, and, as I still hold, quite properly, define the Absolute as Thought. But then you mean, as in my book I explicitly showed, a thought that is no longer, like ours in the exact sciences, concerned with the shadowy Platonic ideas, viewed as conceptional possibilities, but a thought that sees its own fulfilment in the world of its self-possessed life, — in other words, a thought whose Ideas are not mere shadows, but have an aspect in which they are felt as well as meant, appreciated as well as described, — yes, I should unhesitatingly say, loved as well as conceived, willed as well as viewed. Such an Absolute Thought you can also call, in its wholeness, a Self; for it beholds the fulfilment of its own thinking, and views the determined character of its living experience as identical with what its universal conceptions mean. All these names: “Absolute Self,” “Absolute Thought,” “Absolute Experience,” are not, indeed, mere indifferent names for the inexpressible truth; but, when carefully defined through the very process of their construction, they are equally valuable expressions of different aspects of the same truth. God is known as Thought fulfilled; as Experience absolutely organised, so as to have one ideal unity of meaning; as Truth transparent to itself; as Life in absolute accordance with idea;