152. As we have seen, neither of these alternative views is really met by Locke. To the former we may reply that the relation between two events, of which neither has anything in common with the other, but which we improperly speak of as effect and cause (_e.g._ death and a sunstroke), has no likeness to that which we have explained between the world in its contingency and the world as an eternal system--a relation according to which the cause is the effect in unity. Whatever is part of the reality of the world must belong, it would seem, to the ‘ens realissimum,’ its cause. We are thus thrown back on the other horn of the dilemma. Is not matter part of the reality of the world? This is a question to which the method of observing the individual consciousness can give none but a delusive answer. A true answer cannot be given till for this method has been substituted the enquiry, How knowledge is possible, and it has been found that it is only possible as the progressive actualisation in us of a self-consciousness in itself complete, and which in its completeness includes the world as its object. From the point of view thus attained the question as to matter will be, How is it related to this self-consciousness?--a question to which the answer must vary according to what is understood by ‘matter.’ If it means the abstract opposite of thought--that which is supposed void of all determination that comes of thinking--we must pronounce it simply a delusion, the creation of self-consciousness in one stage of its communication to us. If it means the world as in space and time, this we may allow to be real enough as a stage in the process by which self-consciousness constitutes reality. Thus understood, we may speak of it roughly as part of the ‘ens realissimum’ which the complete self-consciousness, or God, includes as its object, without any limitation of the divine perfectness. The limitation only seems to arise so far as we, being ourselves (as our knowledge and morality testify), though formally self-conscious, yet parts of this partial world, interpret it amiss and ascribe to it a reality, in abstraction from the self-conscious subject, which it only derives from relation to it. Thus while on the one hand it is the presence in us of God, as the self-conscious source of reality, that at once gives us the idea of God and of an eternal self, and renders superfluous the further question as to their real existence; on the other hand it is because, for all this presence, we are but emerging from nature, of which as animals we are parts, that to us there must seem an incompatibility of existence between God and matter, between the self and the flux of events which makes our life. This necessary illusion is our bondage, but when the source of illusion is known, the bondage is already being broken. Locke’s antinomies--Hume takes one side of them as true.