Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/139

is it the sign of real power and genuine knowledge, or only of limitation and impenetrable ignorance? Here, the agnostic says it is the latter; the idealist, it is the former; and then the idealist undertakes to show, once more, that the supposition of thought being really limited and merely subjective is a flat self-contradiction, a proposition inevitably withdrawn in the very act of putting it. Then, to clinch the case finally, if his Idealism is only of the type here emerging, he makes haste to add: The fact is, you see, the thinker, to think at all, unavoidably asserts his thinking to be the exhaustive and all-embracing Reality, the Unconditioned that founds all conditions and imparts to things conditioned whatever reality they have, the Absolute in and through which things relative are really relative and relatively real, the immutable IS that is implied in every if. In short, reality turns out to be, exactly, the thinker plus presentation to the thinker; but then, and let us not forget it, says this species of idealist, the thinker is reciprocally in immutable relation to this presentation, this detail, this fragmentary serial experience, these contents of sense. Thus we come to what Hegel called the Absolute Idea, as the absolute identity of Subject and Object, and the inseparable synthesis of the single Omniscient Mind, and its system of ideas, with its multiplicity of fragmentary i.e. sensible objects. And so the inevitable and everlasting truth is, not Agnosticism, but Absolute Idealism — the ism of the Absolute Idea; not the Unknowable Power, but the Self-knowing Mind who is at once One and All, the One Creator inclusive of the manifold creation.