It, there would be no difference left between your

thought and the thing. And, supposing that to have

happened, the question is then whether thought has not

changed its nature.

Let us try to realize more distinctly what this

supposed consummation would involve. Since both

truth and fact are to be there, nothing must be lost,

and in the Absolute we must keep every item of our

experience. We cannot have less, but, on the other hand,

we may have much more; and this more may so supplement

the elements of our actual experience that in the whole

they may become transformed. But to reach a mode of

apprehension, which is quite identical with reality,

surely predicate and subject, and subject and object,

and in short the whole relational form, must be merged.

The Absolute does not want, I presume, to make eyes at

Itself in a mirror, or, like a squirrel in a cage, to

revolve the circle of its perfections. Such processes

must be dissolved in something not poorer but richer

than themselves. And feeling and will must also be

transmuted in this whole, into which thought has

entered. Such a whole state would possess in a superior

form that immediacy which we find (more or less) in

feeling; and in this whole all divisions would be healed

up. It would be experience entire, containing all

elements in harmony. Thought would be present as a

higher intuition; will would be there where the ideal

had become reality; and beauty and pleasure and feeling

would live on in this total fulfilment. Every flame of

passion, chaste or carnal, would still burn in the

Absolute unquenched and unabridged, a note absorbed in

the harmony of its higher bliss. We cannot imagine, I

admit, how in detail this can be. But if truth and fact

are to be one, then in some such way thought must reach

its consummation. But in that consummation thought has

certainly been so transformed, that to go on calling it

thought seems indefensible.

I have tried to show first that, in the proper sense

of thought, thought and fact are not the same. I have

urged, in the second place, that, if their identity is

worked out, thought ends in a reality which

swallows up its character. I will ask next whether

though's advocates can find a barrier to their client's

happy suicide.

They might urge, first, that our consummation is the

Thing-in-itself, and that it makes thought know what

essentially is not knowable. But this objection forgets

that our whole is not anything but sentient experience.

And it forgets that, even when we understand by

"thought" its strict discursive form, our reality does

not exist apart from this. Emphatically the Absolute is

nothing if taken apart from any single one of its

elements. But the Thing-in-itself, on the other hand,

must exist apart.

Let us pass to another objection against our view. We

may be told that the End, because it is that which

thought aims at, is therefore itself (mere) thought.

This assumes that thought cannot desire a consummation

in which it is lost. But does not the river run into the

sea, and the self lose itself in love? And further, as

good a claim for predominance might be made on behalf of

will, and again on behalf of beauty and sensation and

pleasure. Where all elements reach their end in the

Absolute, that end can belong to no one severally. We

may illustrate this principle by the case of morality.

That essentially desires an end which is not merely

moral because it is super-moral. Nay, even personality

itself, our whole individual life and striving, tends to

something beyond mere personality. Of course, the

Absolute has personality, but it fortunately possesses

so much more, that to call it personal would be as

absurd as to ask if it is moral.

But in self-consciousness, I may be told, we actually

experience a state where truth and being are identical;

and here, at all events, thinking is not different from

reality. But in our tenth chapter we have seen that no

such state exists. There is no self-

consciousness in which the object is the same as the

subject, none in which what is perceived exhausts the

whole self. In self-consciousness a part or element, or

again a general aspect or character, becomes distinct

from the whole mass and stands over against the felt

background. But the background is never exhausted by

this object, and it never could be so. An experiment

should convince any man that in self-consciousness what

he feels cannot wholly come before him. It can be

exhausted, if at all, only by a long series of

observations, and the summed result of these

observations cannot be experienced as a fact. Such a

result cannot ever be verified as quite true at any

particular given moment. In short consciousness implies

discrimination of an element from the felt mass, and a

consciousness that should discriminate every element at

once is psychologically impossible. And this