being, or created spirit, the numerical unit in the created universe, viewed as such a spirit appears in what has well been called its natural aspect; viewed, that is, as the organising subject of a natural-scientific experience, marked by fragmentariness that is forever being tentatively overcome and enwholed, — if I may coin a word to match the excellent German one ergänzt. The supernatural, that is to say, the completely rational aspect of this being is left out of the conception we are discussing, — the aspect under which it is seen as the subject and co-operating cause of a moral i.e. completely rational or metaphysical experience. In this last context, the word “experience” has suddenly changed its meaning in kind,[1] and the human consciousness is seen to have, in its total unity, the all-encompassing form of a Conscience, — that Complete Reason, of a truly infinite sphere, in which the primal self-consciousness of the creature actively posits the Ideal which is its real world of being. In this complete reason, or Conscience, the single spirit sees itself as indeed a person — a self-active member of a manifold system of persons, all alike self-active in the inclusive unit of their being; all independent centres of origination, so far as efficient causation is concerned; all moving from “within,” i.e. each from its own thought, and harmonised in a society of
- ↑ The principle here involved is a signal one in language, of vast significance philologically as well as philosophically, and deserves a study which it has never received. By it, words have a power of coming to mean the very opposite of what they were first used to denote. I believe it to be a fundamental law of vocabulary, imbedded in the very nature of language.
