ever I said that, my ideas being fulfilled in their essence by one case, I should gain no essential benefit, I should add no whit to the genuine perfection of my experience, by passing to new cases. If I now, by some deliberate act of attention, arrested myself, or found myself arrested, in this one act of conscious fulfilment of my system of ideas, I should be perfect as a knower and as a possessor, in a sense in which I should not be perfect if I continued to seek, in hopeless repetitions, for truth that lay always beyond. For such search would involve either an ignorance on my part that nothing novel was thus obtained, or a blind fate that drove me helplessly further. The ignorance I should escape, on the hypothesis that I knew my situation. The blind fate I should escape, if my ideals were all fulfilled. The fulfilment of the ideal of escaping from the blind fate would however involve precisely the presence in me of the will to arrest myself, or to be arrested, at this one world as a single whole of experience. In other words, the perfection of my consciousness, in the supposed case, would involve the element called my will. And my will would mean an attentive dwelling upon this world to the exclusion of the barely possible worlds, which would remain unreal for me merely because my attention left them unreal.
In a variety of terms there is, in such a case as the present, where one has gradually to eliminate various accidental associations, a certain advantage. We may, then, venture on still another name for the present aspect of the Absolute Consciousness. The theology of the past has frequently dealt with the
