it, is a mere Animism. We know, they say, that the
world is real; but how should we know that its inner
Being, so foreign to ours, resembles our own will? But
our own Fourth Conception of Being is not in the older
sense animistic. For it does not first say, The world is
known to be real, and then add, And we conjecture that this
reality resembles that of our own will. What our view
asserts is that the world is and can be real only as the
object expressing in final, in individual form, the whole
meaning which our finite will, imperfectly embodied in
fleeting instants, seeks and attempts to define as its own
Other, and also as precisely its own ultimate expression.
In other words, the world, from our point of view,
becomes real only as such an ultimate expression of our
ideas. But when the sceptic here retorts, But perhaps then
no world is real at all, we reply with the now several times
repeated observation that the non-being of any specific
object is subject to the same conditions as the Being of
all things. What is not, is not, merely because our
complete object, the complete expression of our whole
meaning, when, in this transient moment, we speak of the
thing that is not, excludes its presence. The very possibility
of our ignorance and error implies the presence of
the whole self-conscious truth.
II
Results in philosophy must needs lead to new problems. With this definition in mind of what it is to be, how shall we next undertake to describe that more special constitution of the world which our concept of Being involves?
The general title of our course called attention to a
