LECTURE IX
UNIVERSALITY AND UNITY
The concept of Being often passes for the most
abstract of human ideas. If the first outcome of our quest,
as presented in the two foregoing discussions, is sound,
the true concept of Being is the most concrete and living
of all our ideas.
I
We began these lectures indeed with an abstraction, with the contrast between telling what an ideal object is, and asserting that this object exists. We called this the contrast between the internal and the external meaning of ideas. This abstraction Realism carried to the extreme, asserting that the idea finds the external object merely as its indifferent fate. All relations between the two are, for Realism, additional facts, existent over and above the primary indifference. Hereupon, however, the inner self-destruction of Realism, which we found to be the logical result of these assumptions, drove us, as we sought for truth, into the mystic’s realm. There we first learned something of the deeper meaning of the ancient thesis: Omne Ens est bonum, — a thesis which indeed appears in Aristotle’s doctrine, but which can never be justified on a realistic basis. To be appeared in this world of the mystic to mean the same as to fulfil the inner purpose
