34^ MAN AND GOD. 



such a View would involve a mistaken conception of 

 the relation of a whole to its parts. 



For the conception of a whole is finite also In this, 

 that it is modelled upon the wholes given In our 

 experience, and that we have no business to extend 

 the analogy off-hand to a whole in which the rela-- 

 tion to its parts would be fundamentally different 

 from anything with which we are acquainted. 



The wholes which fall within the range of our 

 experience may be conceived in two ways, and in 

 two ways alone. They must either be regarded 

 from without, and given as wholes external to the 

 spectator, or regarded from within, as the sum of 

 their parts. In the first case alone, however, are 

 the parts at once given as parts by direct inspection, 

 and is the whole 2^ reality which includes the parts. 

 In the second, the whole has to be constituted by 

 the successive synthesis of the parts, and hence it 

 is always ideal and exists for thought only. 



Now the universe, as the totality of things, is 

 necessarily a whole of the second kind, since it is 

 evident that there cannot be any existence outside 

 it, which could regard it from without. But If so, it 

 follows that the All is not a real whole, but literally 

 ■*' the sum of things " ; the universe, as a whole, is 

 simply a collective expression for the sum of its 

 "parts." In other words, the whole is simply the 

 ideal limit of its parts, and not anything which has 

 real existence apart from them. The individual 

 'existences in the universe alone possess reality, and 

 ;are the " first substances," and their inclusion in a 

 supposed Absolute is simply an unpardonable repet- 

 ition of the old Platonic fallacy of a transcendent 

 universal, apart from and superior to the real 

 individual. But the All is nothing beside the 



