by the identification of being or reality with experience or with sentience in its widest meaning. This step I have taken without hesitation, and I will not add a further defence of it here. The most serious objection to it is raised, I think, from the side of Solipsism, and I have treated that at length. But this step by itself leaves us far from the desired solution of our dilemma; for between facts of experience and the thought of them and the truth about them the difference still remains, and the difficulty which attaches to this difference.
The solution of this dilemma offered in Chapter XV is, I believe, the only solution possible. It contains the main thesis of this work, views opposed to that thesis remaining, it seems to me, caught in and destroyed by the dilemma. And we must notice two main features in this doctrine. It contends on one side that truth or thought essentially does not satisfy its own claims, that it demands to be, and so far already is, something which completely it cannot be. Hence if thought carried out its own nature, it both would and would not have passed beyond itself and become also an Other. And in the second place this self-completion of thought, by inclusion of the aspects opposed to mere thinking, would be what we mean by reality, and by reality we can mean no more than this. The criticisms on this doctrine which I have seen, do not appear to me to rest on any serious enquiry either as to what the demands of thought really are, or what their satisfaction involves. But if to satisfy the intellect is to be true and real, such a question must be fundamental.
IV. With the solution of this problem about truth comes the whole view of Reality. Reality is above thought and above every partial aspect of being, but it includes them all. Each of these completes itself by uniting with the rest, and so makes the perfection of the whole. And this whole is experience, for anything other than experience is meaningless. Now anything that in any sense ‘is,’ qualifies the absolute reality and so is real. But on the other hand, because everything, to complete itself and to satisfy its own claims, must pass beyond itself, nothing in the end is real except the Absolute. Everything else is appearance; it is that the character of which goes beyond its own existence, is inconsistent with it and transcends it. And viewed intellectually appearance is error. But the remedy lies in supplementation by inclusion of that which is both outside and yet essential, and in the Absolute this remedy is perfected. There is no mere appearance or utter chance or absolute error, but all is relative. And the degree of reality is measured by the amount of supplementation required in each case, and by the extent to which the completion of anything entails its own destruction as such.[1]
V. But this Absolute, it has been objected, is a mere blank or else unintelligible. Certainly it is unintelligible if that means
- ↑ On the question of degrees of appearance see more in § VII.
