Absolute reality

“ Thus Consciousness, far from being a purely subjective and empty train of fancies, contains nothing which does not rest upon and image forth a Higher and Infinite Reality. Idealism itself becomes a sublime and Absolute Realism. ”

“ All these, though in some sense facts which qualify reality, are not real as they appear. What is real is one single, indivisible, timeless whole, called the Absolute, which is in some sense spiritual, but does not consist of souls, or of thought and will as we know them. ”

“ Is the reasoning to an Absolute Experience and an Absolute Thought by means of the implications inevitable in asserting our limitation to be real, capable (1) of making out an Ultimate Reality in any other sense than that of an Active Supreme Judgment as the grounding or inclusive being of the single thinker who frames the argument ”

“ For where interests are in conflict with each other or with reality, and where the loser is not extirpated, its revenge may be just this self-fulfilment in unreality, in idea, which philosophies of absolute values offer it. Dreams, some of the arts, religion, and philosophy may indeed be considered as such fulfilments, worlds of luxuriant self-realization of all that part of our nature which the harsh conjunctions with the environment overthrow and suppress. ”

“ That this modern view has its own share of deeper truth we all recognize. But is this the whole truth? Have we no access whatever to any other aspect of reality than the one which this naturalistic view emphasizes? ”

“ Behind the veil of these mundane things, they feel, something quite different obscurely shimmers, shining forth clearly in the great moments of illumination, which alone give anything worthy to be called real knowledge of truth. To seek such moments, therefore, is to them the way of wisdom, rather than, like the man of science, to observe coolly, to analyse without emotion, and to accept without question the equal reality of the trivial and the important. ”

“ It is also true, that realism, in its abstract sundering of facts from desire, would seem often to have abandoned entirely any effort to win for our consciousness any final satisfaction in the presence of reality. ”

“ The true world: but who actually says that the apparent world must be of less value than the true world? Do not our instincts contradict this judgment? Is not man eternally occupied in creating an imaginative world, because he will have a better world than reality? In the first place, how do we know that our world is not the true world? ”

“ If, then, your conscious ideas are naught, your Absolute is naught in precisely the same sense, and in precisely the same degree as the ideas and as the finite facts are naught. On the other hand, if your Absolute is real, then, unless it has a distinguishing positive content of its own, unless it is more than mere finality and peace, the finite world of conscious strivings after it, is precisely as real as itself, since your Absolute borrows all its Being from its contrast with those strivings. ”

“ Should we ever reach absolutely terminal experiences, experiences in which we all agreed, which were superseded by no revised continuations, these would not be true, they would be real, they would simply be, and be indeed the angles, corners, and linchpins of all reality, on which the truth of everything else would be stayed. ”

“ The true rational warrant for this confidence of ours lies in the fact that whatever else is real, some form of such a wider insight, some essentially super-individual and superhuman insight is real. For unless it is real our opinions, including any opinion that we may have that doubts or questions or denies its reality, are all equally meaningless. Thus even when we appeal to common-sense we really appeal to a genuine but super-human insight. ”

“ The real, as the independent, is as careless of your immediate feelings as it is of the mediation of your thinking processes. It is beyond what you see, feel, touch. For seeing, feeling, touch, vanish; but reality remains when unseen, unfelt, untouched by any external observer. Now realists usually lay great stress upon the substantiality of the real, and the classic doctrine of substance was developed upon the basis of this notion of the independently real. And thirdly, Does the real make ideas true or false? ”

“ According to this conception, I repeat, to be real means to be independent of an idea or experience through which the real being is, from without, felt, or thought, or known. And this, I say, is the view best known as metaphysical Realism, the view which, recognizing independent beings as real, lays explicit stress upon their independence as the very essence of their reality. ”

“ You talk of reality as fact. Well,” insists the mystic, “here shall be your fact, your datum, an absolutely pure datum. As pure it will fulfil the purpose of thinking, which always desires its own Other, or in other words always really desires just the cessation of all its strife in peace. Only in the immediate that has no beyond, is such peace. Now that is the Reality, that is the Soul. ”

“ Experience and Thought are upon our hands; and together they determine for us the problems regarding Being. Realism offered to us the first solution of this problem by attempting to define the Reality of the world as something wholly independent of our ideas. ”

“ But truth, we saw at once, could no longer be identified with a formal idea, known or unknown or unknowable; reality could no longer have the character of a fixedly constituted thing, whether such a thing were present in experience or not; and perfection, even the perfection of God, could no longer be a mere status, a passive possession of certain characters, attributes, or prerogatives. Truth became, as was said, in want of a better word, a spirit; reality was a life; perfection was a power. ”

“ I might very well, for instance, have started with the self as a given unity, and have asked how far any other things are real otherwise, and how far again the self satisfies its own demands on reality. ”

“ As a fact, only individual experience is real, be that the experience of man or God. And whoever asserts: “The reality is experience,” has precisely those alternatives to face about the sense in which experience is real which have been discussed in the foregoing general account of the problem of Being. There are in the world the experiences of men. ”

“ That may be metaphysical reality, reality for God; but what we need is practical reality, reality for ourselves; and, to have that, an object must not only appear, but it must appear both interesting and important. The worlds whose objects are neither interesting nor important we treat simply negatively, we brand them as unreal. ”

“ There thus emerges a distinction of vast importance, that of truth and falsehood, of reality and unreality, or between representation and reality. There arise two worlds, the world of ideas, and the world of reality which it is supposed to represent, and, in many cases, to represent badly. ”

“ It is dangerous to rest upon the evidence of the senses, for this evidence is not absolute, and therefore not real, in our sense of the word. All that is beautiful and good in your individual consciousness is permanent. ”

“ They are all sure to be coloured by finite illusions, and that fact you yourself already recognise whenever you reflect. But the truth confirms all that is significant about your meaning, all the essential ideas involved in these illusions, just in so far as they are ideas that have a positive conscious intent and sense. For instance, if your meaning involves essentially moral ideas, then you are, in absolute truth, a member of a real and concrete social and moral order, which contains your life along with the lives of other moral individuals. ”

“ Yes, O God, Thou wilt and canst give us one day a reality, which shall embody and redouble and satisfy our present ideals,—as thou hast, indeed, already proved to us, in our love here below, [Pg 267] which intoxicates us with moments in which the inner becomes the outer, and the Ideal, Reality ”

“ For it does not first say, The world is known to be real, and then add, And we conjecture that this reality resembles that of our own will. What our view asserts is that the world is and can be real only as the object expressing in final, in individual form, the whole meaning which our finite will, imperfectly embodied in fleeting instants, seeks and attempts to define as its own Other, and also as precisely its own ultimate expression. In other words, the world, from our point of view, becomes real only as such an ultimate expression of our ideas. ”

“ But the Absolute Experience and Will form, as we have asserted, one Unity of consciousness, one moment or instant of fulfilled life, over against which there is no external Other wherewith this whole could be contrasted. If I know myself by contrast with my neighbour or with my distant ideal, how can the Absolute, who has no neighbours, and no unfulfilled ideals, know such a contrast between himself and somebody else? In this sense, one would say, the Absolute must simply transcend self-consciousness. ”

“ Beyond all doubt then it is clear that Reality is one. It has unity, but we must go on to ask, a unity of what? And we have already found that all we know consists wholly of experience. Reality must be, therefore, one Experience, and to doubt this conclusion is impossible. ”

“ It's finished. Now to find out who is right, the scientists and philosophers who say reality is forever unreachable, or the artists who say there isn't any reality—that we make the whole thing up to suit ourselves. ”

“ The Theory of Being requires us to view every fact of nature, and of man’s life, as a fragmentary glimpse of the Absolute life, as a revelation, however mysterious and to us men now in detail illegible, of the unity of the perfect Whole. Why we hold this to be a true theory, we have set forth at length in the foregoing series of lectures; and the detailed proof of the general thesis concerns us here no longer. ”

“ Such terms as spirit, life, and power are confessedly somewhat dangerous terms to use. Especially the first is liable to misunderstanding. Yet, whatever [p.153] common usage may be, when I say that truth is not a creed but a spirit, that reality is not a thing but a power, the reference is directly to that agent or principle of validity which has been found to hold our experience, naturally so faulty, to contact and intimacy with the real world. ”

“ But we also predicate equality in the judgment of reality; what can the empirical sense of such a proposition be when the sense of equality is alleged to be non-empirical? We present reality to ourselves in a space and time order. What sense has this idea? We ourselves and our body belong to the idea which we have of reality. We represent things as acting upon our sense-organs and connect these with our psychical processes. The actual coincidence of these results with what we actually experience, warrants our ideas of what we call objective reality. ”

“ Reality without form or residence—real as a spirit, not a programme, and: Nothing finally and fixedly real in itself, yet all things working together for what is real. With this creed clearly in mind, moreover, we may look out upon the world and see things that possibly we have never seen at all, or not seen so clearly before. ”

“ But while Reality as such does not imply that what is real is directly accessible, in its details, to the private and finite experience of any or of all men, it is different with the sort of reality which we ascribe to what we usually regard as the material world. ”

“ The mystery of our being, and the mystery of our ceasing to be, acting upon intelligences which are for ever striving to comprehend the enigma of themselves, leads by a natural process to a love for the Ideal. The discovery of those truths which advance the human mind towards that point of knowledge to which all its secret longings tend, should excite a higher feeling than any mere creation of the fancy, how beautiful soever it may be. The [Pg xv] phenomena of Reality are more startling than the phantoms of the Ideal. Truth is stranger than fiction. ”

“ But if, instead of yielding to the seductions of our metaphor, be it sentence, shower, or bird, we analyze more carefully the notion suggested by it that we are constituent parts of the absolute's eternal field of consciousness, we find grave difficulties arising. First, the difficulty I found with the mind-dust theory. If the absolute makes us by knowing us, how can we exist otherwise than as it knows us? But it knows each of us indivisibly from everything else. ”

“ In the relative sense, then, the sense in which we contrast reality with simple unreality, and in which one thing is said to have more reality than another, and to be more believed, reality means simply relation to our emotional and active life. This is the only sense which the word ever has in the mouths of practical men. In this sense, whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real; whenever an object so appeals to us that we turn to it, accept it, fill our mind with it, or practically take account of it, so far it is real for us, and we believe it. ”

“ The more harmonious anything is—the fewer its internal discrepancies or contradictions—the higher is its degree of reality; and the greater its comprehensiveness—the fewer predicates left outside it—the higher also is its degree of reality. ”

“ Those chapter titles seem to me to signify the chief dangers confronting the world today—perhaps confronting the world in any day—and the main reasons why we do not face reality as we should. I regard Facing Reality as an important book and I am not alone in so regarding it. What do we mean by reality? ”

“ And we observe the constitution of that realm. It is through and through a constitution that answers our questions, embodies our meanings, integrates our purposes. It is then in essence a realm of fact fulfilling purpose, of life embodying idea, of meaning won by means of the experience of its own content. The now present but passing form of our human consciousness is fragmentary. We wait, wonder, pass from fact to fact, from fragment to fragment. What a study of the concept of Being reveals to us is precisely that the whole has a meaning, and is real only as a Meaning Embodied. ”