Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/413

world, while the other would insist both upon the variety, and, in some modified way, upon the relative independence of the individual lives. The one thesis could be briefly summarized thus: This Fourth Conception of Being asserts that what is, expresses, in a complete life of concrete experience, the whole meaning of the ideas that refer to any object. Now, when any one of us rationally speaks of the universe, of the whole of Being, he has an idea, and this idea means precisely the entire world itself. Whatever life pulsates anywhere, whatever meaning is at any time fragmentarily seen embodied in flying moments, — all such lives and meanings form the object of our metaphysical inquiry. Now our very power to make the whole of Being our problem, already implies that the object of our inquiry, whatever it proves to contain, has as the fulfilment of one idea, the constitution of a single life of concrete fulfilment. All varieties of individual expression are thus subordinate to the unity of the whole. All differences amongst various ideas result from and are secondary to the very presence of one universal type of ideal meaning in all the realm of life. All appearance of isolation in finite beings, all the fragmentariness of their finitude, these are indeed but aspects of the whole truth. The One is in all, and all are in the One. All meanings, if completely developed, unite in one meaning, and this it is which the real world expresses. Every idea, if fully developed, is of universal application. Since this one world of expression is a life of experience fulfilling ideas, it possesses precisely the attributes which the ages have most associated with the name of God. For God is the Absolute Being, and the perfect fulness of life. Only