Itself even in opposition to the whole--all will be

contained within the one absorbing experience. For this

will embrace all self-consciousness harmonized, though,

as such, transmuted and suppressed. We cannot possibly

construe, I admit, such an experience to ourselves. We

cannot imagine how in detail its outline is filled up.

But to say that it is real, and that it unites certain

general characters within the living system of one

undivided apprehension, is within our power. The

assertion of this Absolute's reality I hope in the

sequel to justify. Here (if I have not failed) I have

shown that, at least from the point of view of thinking,

It is free from self-contradiction. The justification

for thought of an Other may help both to explain and to

bury the Thing-in-itself.

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CHAPTER XVI

ERROR

WE have so far sketched in outline the Absolute which we

have been forced to accept, and we have pointed out the

general way in which thought may fall within it. We must

address ourselves now to a series of formidable

objections. If our Absolute is possible in itself, it

seems hardly possible as things are. For there are

undeniable facts with which it does not seem compatible.

Error and evil, space, time, chance and mutability, and

the unique particularity of the "this" and the "mine"--

all these appear to fall outside an individual

experience. To explain them away or to explain them, one

of these courses seems necessary, and yet both seem

impossible. And this is a point on which I am anxious to

be clearly understood. I reject the offered dilemma, and

deny the necessity of a choice between these two

courses. I fully recognise the facts, I do not make the

smallest attempt to explain their origin, and I

emphatically deny the need for such an explanation. In

the first place to show how and why the universe is so

that finite existence belongs to it, is utterly

impossible. That would imply an understanding of the

whole not practicable for a mere part. It would mean a

view by the finite from the Absolute's point of view,

and in that consummation the finite would have been

transmuted and destroyed. But, in the second place, such

an understanding is wholly unnecessary. We have not to

choose between accounting for everything on one

side and on the other side admitting it as a disproof of

our doctrine of the Absolute. Such an alternative is not

logical. If you wish to refute a wide theory based on

general grounds, it is idle merely to produce facts

which upon it are not explained. For the inability to

explain these may be simply our failure in particular