never have been lost. I
may say, in short, that God or being, is my perfect cognitive self.

The argument for absolute idealism is a constructive interpretation of
the subjectivistic contention that knowledge can never escape the circle
of its own activity and states. To meet the demand for a final and
standard truth, a demand which realism meets with its doctrine of a
being independent of any mind, this philosophy defines a _standard
mind_. The impossibility of defining objects in terms of relativity to a
finite self, conducts dialectically to the conception of the _absolute
self_. The sequel to my error or exclusiveness, is truth or
inclusiveness. The outcome of the dialectic is determined by the
symmetry of the antithesis. Thus, corrected experience implies a last
correcting experience; partial cognition, complete cognition; empirical
subject, transcendental subject; finite mind, an absolute mind. The
following statement is taken from a contemporary exponent of the
philosophy:

"What you and I lack, when we lament our human ignorance, is
simply a certain desirable and logically possible state of
mind, or type of experience; to wit, a state of mind in which
we should wisely be able to say that we had fulfilled in
experience what we now have merely in idea, namely, the
knowledge, the immediate and felt presence, of what we now
call the Absolute Reality. . . . There is an Absolute
Experience for which the conception of an absolute reality,
_i. e._, the conception of a system of ideal truth, is
fulfilled by the very contents that get presented to this
experience. This Absolute Experience is related to our
experience as an organic whole to its own fragments. It is an
experience which finds fulfilled all that the completest
thought can conceive as genuinely possible. Herein lies its
definition as an Absolute. For the Absolute Experience, as for
ours, there are data, contents, facts. But these data, these
contents, express, for the Absolute Experience, its own
meaning, its thought, its ideas. Contents beyond these that it
possesses, the Absolute Experience knows to be, in genuine
truth, impossible. Hence its contents are indeed
particular,--a selection from the world of bare or merely
conceptual possibilities,--but they form a self-determined
whole, than which nothing completer, more organic, more
fulf