ism, as we have seen, is equally committed to the actually
infinite.[1]
IV. The Infinite as a Totality
And yet one will persistently retort, “Your idea of the complete exhaustion of what you all the while declare to be, as infinite, an inexhaustible series, is still a plain contradiction.”
I reply that I am anxious to report the facts, as one finds them whenever one has to deal with any endless Kette. The facts are these: (1) This series, if real, is inexhaustible by any process of successive procedure, whereby one passes from one member to the next. It is then expressly a series with no last term. Try to go through it from first to last, and the process can never be completed. Now this negative character of the series, if it is real, is as true for the Absolute as for a boy at school. In this sense, namely, viewed as a succession, since the series has no last term, its last term cannot be found by God or man, and does not exist. In this sense, too, any effort to
- ↑ As for my reasons for speaking of an Absolute Will at all, despite Mr. Bradley’s repeated objections, I must insist that we have precisely the same reasons for attributing a generalized type of Will to the Absolute that we have for attributing to it Experience. And the grounds for this conclusion have been stated at length in Lecture VII of the foregoing series. My insistence means mere report of the facts, in the best accessible language. To say that the Absolute has or is Will, is simply to say that it knows its object, namely itself in its wholeness, as this and no other, despite the fact that the “mere” Thought, which it also possesses, consists, as abstract thought, in defining such an Other, and because of the fact that this and no other satisfies or fulfils the complete internal meaning of the Absolute itself. That Thought, Will, and Experience are not “transmuted” but concretely present from the Absolute point of view, is a thesis merely equivalent to saying that the Absolute consciously views itself as the immediately given fulfilment of purpose in this and no other life. As immediately given fact, the life is Experience. In so far as the purpose is distinguished from its fulfilment, one has an Idea seeking its Other. And this is Thought. In so far as this and no other life fulfils purpose, we have Will. All these are concretely distinguished aspects of the fact, if the Absolute is a Self, and views itself as such. If this is not true, the Absolute is less than nothing.
