xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 225 



The truth therefore is that the activity is the substance : a 

 thing is only in so far as active. And so it is the activity 

 which makes both the essence and the accidents, both 

 of which are as it were precipitated from the same 

 process of active functioning. The essence is merely such 

 aspects of the whole behaviour as are selected from among 

 the rest by reason either of their relative permanence or 

 of their importance for our purposes. 1 And so we may 

 define the substratum which we have feigned as the 

 hidden source of substantiality as being nothing but 

 a permanent possibility of activity. But true reality does 

 not reside among the tangled roots of things. We have 

 no need to dig down vainly to a subject/ which is not 

 thought or will or feeling, but only has them, in derision, 

 in order to discover our true self. To find true Being 

 we must look upwards to the Ideal, not downwards to the 

 unknowable. Our true self is not what underlies thought, 

 will and feeling, but what combines them in a perfect 

 harmony ; 2 Reality is not what transcends experience 

 but what perfects it. 



Let us once conceive, therefore, a Being which has 

 realised all its potentialities, and our difficulties disappear. 

 For we shall then have transcended the conditions which 

 engender the illusion of an inscrutable background of 

 substance. At present our existence seems immersed 

 in a sea of possibilities which are the objects of our 

 unceasing hopes and fears : nothing is ever quite all that 

 it is capable of being ; nothing can ever wholly realise 

 itself in any single moment. Hence the potential every 

 where extends beyond the actual, and the shadow of an 

 incalculable and inexplicable Thing-in-itself is cast over 



the actual plurality of things to the higher reality of an all-including world-ground 

 is that the plurality is actual (tvepyeia), while the unity is only implicit (SucdyUet), 

 and rests on our experience of the former. It is, therefore, of secondary reality 

 and value. Cp. p. 67. 



1 These two criteria are, of course, convergent. For a permanent aspect is 

 naturally one which it is important for us to take into account, while an 

 important aspect is naturally one which we try to render permanent. J. S. Mill 

 (Examination of Hamilton, p. 239) recognises the first only when he says that 

 the sensations answering to the Secondary Qualities are only occasional, those 

 answering to the Primary, constant. 



2 Cp. Riddles of the Sphinx , p. 140. 



Q 



