xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 203 



its own ultimateness. But by this same achievement it 

 would have dissolved our original problem. The antithesis 

 of appearance and reality would have vanished. 

 Ultimate reality having become immediate experience 

 the two would coincide, and we should have entered into 

 the fruition of their union. 



And so should we not finally catch a glimpse of an 

 ideal which, in its own way, theology has dreamt of as 

 the Beatific Vision ? The ideal of knowledge, as of 

 the life to which it ministers, would not be an infinitely 

 complex system of relations about which one might argue 

 without end, but the vision, or immediate perception, of a 

 reality which had absorbed all truth and so had become, 

 as it were, intellectually transparent, and in which the 

 whole meaning of the cosmic scheme was summed up 

 and luminously comprehended not only understood, but 

 seen to be very good, and more than this, to be supremely 

 beautiful. In other words, the bliss which Aristotle tried 

 so hard to attribute to a Deity scornful of all communion 

 with a suffering universe, could never be derived from a 

 discursive thinking upon thought ; l it would have to 

 take the form of an aesthetic contemplation of the perfect 

 and all-embracing harmony. 2 



1 Not that Aristotle s j i^tris is really discursive. His thought (though not 

 always his language) has really quite outgrown the Platonic antithesis of sensation 

 and thought. 



2 For suggestions as to how this Beatific Vision can be conceived as attainable, 

 see the next essay. 



