do not possess it until I find my will in it; and I do not find that, until what I have is a harmony or a whole in system.
Both in theory and practice my end is to realize myself as a whole. But is this all? Is a consistent view all that we want in theory? Is a harmonious life all that we want in practice? Certainly not. A doctrine must not only hold together, but it must hold the facts together as well. We can not rest in it simply because it does not contradict itself. The theory must take in the facts, and an ultimate theory must take in all the facts. So again in practice. It is no human ideal to lead ‘the life of an oyster.’ We have no right first to find out just what we happen to be and to have, and then to contract our wants to that limit. We can not do it if we would and morality calls to us that, if we try to do it, we are false to ourselves. Against the sensuous facts around us and within us, we must for ever attempt to widen our empire; we must at least try to go forward, or we shall certainly be driven back.
So self-realization means more than the mere assertion of the self as a whole.[1] And here we may refer to two principles, which Kant put forward under the names of ‘Homogeneity’ and ‘Specification.’ Not troubling ourselves with our relation to Kant, we may say that the ideal is neither to be perfectly homogeneous, nor simply to be specified to the last degree, but rather to combine both these elements. Our true being is not the extreme of unity, nor of diversity, but the perfect identity of both. And ‘Realize yourself’ does not mean merely ‘Be a whole,’ but ‘Be an infinite whole.’
At this word, I am afraid, the reader who has not yet despaired of us will come to a stop, and refuse to enter into the region of nonsense. But why should it be nonsense? When the poet and the preacher tell us the mind is infinite, most of us feel that it is so; and has our science really come to this, that the beliefs which answer to our highest feelings must be theoretical absurdities? Should not the philosophy, which tells us such a thing, be very
- ↑ I leave out of sight the important question whether any partial whole can be self-consistent. If (which seems the better view) this can not be, we shall not need to say ‘Systematise and widen,’ but the second will be implied in the first.
