ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 103 



The purity of thought does not, of course, mean that it stands 

 in no organic connection with the lower forms of consciousness. 

 It has grown out of them. Experience the data of mere per 

 ception and the quasi-universals formed by induction is and 

 remains its points of departure. Cut off from this origin, it would 

 be a dead formalism. Its purity, then, means its negativity 

 in the sense which we have previously described. Having 

 emerged from experience, the explicit fact about it is that it is 

 not experience. It is not, like experience, subject to correction 

 by yet unknown exceptions ; for its truth is dependent upon noth 

 ing outside of itself. That is to say, it has no object with which 

 it must square or, if you please, its only object is itself and 

 its development consists solely in its better and better squaring 

 with itself. Thus it exhibits an absolute universality and neces 

 sity, such as experience indefinitely strives towards, while ever 

 remaining at an. infinite distance from it. 



Pure thought also differs from experience in its transcendence 

 of the individual limitations of the thinker. Each man s expe 

 rience is more or less peculiar to himself; and inductive science 

 can only approximately cast out the errors thus arising. But 

 pure thought is not one man s thought to the exclusion of others . 

 How could it be, seeing that it has no object beyond itself? The 

 varying experiences of different men have a meeting-point in 

 the common object to which they refer. But pure thought is 

 its own object; so that the universality which it possesses means 

 that, while it emerges from the individual experiences of men, it is 

 unitary. Not that it is a bare identity either (as if one man s 

 thought were ipso facto another s) or an abstract universality 

 (as if one man s thought were simply like another s). It is a 

 concrete universal, of which their several thoughts are partial, 

 though essential, aspects. The logic has an existence and char 

 acter of its own, independent of the circumstance that you may 

 resolve to study it; though, again, it is only in the conscious 

 life of you and of other men that it has any existence. (So the 

 state lives before the citizen is born; but there can be no state 



