alienation of content. Our whole mental life moves by a transcendence of the “this,” by sheer disregard of its claim to possess any property. The looseness of some feature of the “what” from its fusion with the “that”—its self-reference to, and its operation on, something beyond—if you leave out this, you have lost the mainspring of psychical movement. But this is the ideality of the given, its non-possession of that character with which it appears, but which only appears in it. And Association—who could use it as mere co-existence within the “this”? But, if anything more, it is at once the union of the ideal, the synthesis of the eternal. Thus the “mine” has no detail which is not the property of connections beyond. The merest coincidence, when you observe it, is a distinction which couples universal ideas. And, in brief, the “mine” has no content except that which is left there by our impotence. Its character in this respect is, in other words, merely negative.
Hence to urge such a character against our Absolute would be unmeaning. It would be to turn our ignorance of system into a positive objection, to make our failure a ground for the denial of possibility. We have no basis on which to doubt that all content comes together harmoniously in the Absolute. We have no reason to think that any feature adheres to the “this,” and is unable to transcend it. What is true is that, for us, the incomplete diversity of various systems, the perplexing references of each same feature to many ideal wholes, and again that positive special feeling, which we have dealt with above—all this detail is not made one in any way which we can verify. That it all is reconciled we know, but how, in particular, is hid from us. But because this result must be, and because there is nothing against it, we believe that it is.
We have seen that in the “this,” on one side, there
