Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/47

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10
THE CONCEPTION OF GOD

by themselves, and you have to question whether or no they are true accounts of facts. Answer your questions, wholly for yourself, without intermediation, and then you have got your ideas, your thoughts, somehow into the presence of experienced facts. There are thus two factors or elements in completed and genuine knowing, namely: fact, or something experienced, on the one hand; and mere idea, or pure thought about actual or possible experience, on the other hand. Divorce those two elements of knowledge, let the experienced fact, actual or possible, be remote from the idea or thought about it, and then the being who merely thinks, questions, and, so far, can only question. His state is such that he wonders: Is my idea true? But let the divorce be completely overcome, and then the being who fully knows answers questions, in so far as he simply sees his ideas fulfilled in the facts of his experience, and beholds his experiences as the fulfilment of his ideas.

Very well, then, an Omniscient Being is defined as one in whom these two factors of knowledge, so often divorced in us, are supposed to be fully and universally joined. Such a being, I have said, would behold answered, in the facts present to his experience, all rational, all logically possible questions. That is, for him, all genuinely significant, all truly thinkable ideas would be seen as directly fulfilled, and fulfilled in his own experience.

These two factors of his knowledge would, however, still remain distinguishable. He would think, or have ideas, — richer ideas than our present fragments of thought, I need not say; but he would