It is the aim of the Absolute _a priori_ philosophy to raise this certainty to truth: or, as one may rather say, to reduce this certainty to its kernel of truth. It seeks to determine the limits--not _of_ this absolute and basic experience (for it has no external limits)--but _in_ this experience: the anatomy and physiology of the Absolute,--the correlations and inclusions, the distinctions and syntheses in the unconditioned field. It examines the _foundation_ of all knowledge. But--if this be the phrase--we must be on our guard against a misapprehension of its terms. The foundations are also knowledge: they are _in_ all knowledge and experience, its synthetic link and its analytic distinctions. We must not shrink from paradoxes in expression. The house of knowledge, the world of experience, is as self-centred and self-sustaining, and even more so, than the planetary system. It is a totality in which each part hangs upon and helps to hold up the others, but which needs no external help, resting and yet moving, self-poised and free.
We may be spared, therefore, verbal criticism on the Absolute and Unconditioned. The Absolute, and Infinite, and Eternal is no mere negation:--the only pure negation is NOT, and even that has a flaw in its claim. It is perfectly true--and it can only be babes and sucklings that need to be reminded of the fact--that none of us realises and attains the _ne plus ultra_ of knowledge and that all our systems have their day,--have their day and cease to be. 'The coasts of the Happy Isles of philosophy where we would fain arrive are covered only with fragments of shattered ships, and we behold no intact vessel in their bays[10].' So too the whole earth is full of graves; and yet humanity lives on, charged with the attainments of the past and full of the promise of the future. Let us by all means be critical and not dogmatic: let us never entirely forget that each utterance, each science, each system of ours falls short of what it wanted to be, and for a moment at least thought it was. But let us not carry our critical abstinence into dogmatic non-intervention: or, if so, let us silently accept the great renunciation of all utterance henceforth. System we all presuppose in our words and deeds, and should be much hurt if our defect in it were seriously alleged: the Absolute we all rest in, though amid so many self-imposed and other distractions we feel and see it not. The philosopher proposes for his task--or rather the philosopher is one on whom this task forces itself as for him the one thing inevitable--to determine what is that system and what that Absolute, or, if the phrase be preferred, the philosopher traces to its unity, and retraces into its differences that Experience--that felt, known, and willed synthesis of Reality,--that realised ideal world--on which and in which we live and move. He does not make the system, nor does he set up the Absolute. He only tries to discover the system, and to construe the Absolute.