§ 1. In a sense “reality” for each of us means that of which he must take account if his special purposes are to find fulfilment. § 2. But ultimately the world must possess a structure of which _all_ purposes, each in its own way, must take account. This is the “Ultimate Reality” or “Absolute” of Metaphysics. In Metaphysics we regard it from the special standpoint of the scientific intellect. There are other legitimate attitudes towards it, _e.g._, that of practical religion. § 3. The inseparability of reality from immediate experience involves the recognition of it as teleological and as uniquely individual. § 4. The experience within which all reality falls cannot be my own, nor yet the “collective” experience of the aggregate of conscious beings. It must be an individual experience which apprehends the totality of existence as the harmonious embodiment of a single “purpose.” The nearest analogue our own life presents to such a type of experience is to be found in the satisfied insight of personal love. § 5. The experience of such an “Absolute” must not be thought of as a mere reduplication of our own, or of the scientific hypotheses by which we co-ordinate facts for the purposes of inference. § 6. Our conception is closely connected with that of Berkeley, from which it differs by the stress it lays on the purposive and selective aspect of experience. § 7. Realism, both of the Agnostic and of the Dogmatic type, is incompatible with the meaning we have been led to attach to “Reality.” But Agnosticism is justified in insisting on the limitations of our knowledge of Reality, and Dogmatic Realism in rejecting the identification of Reality with experience as a merely cognitive function of finite percipients. § 8. Subjectivism, according to which all that I know is states of my own “consciousness,” is irreconcilable with the admitted facts of life, and arises from the psychological fallacy of “introjection.” § 1. In the preceding book we have seen that the very nature of the metaphysical problem predetermines the general character of the answer we are to give to it. What our intellect can accept as finally real, we saw, must be indissolubly one with actual experience, and it must be an internally coherent system. In the present book we have to discuss more in detail the structure which must belong to any reality possessing these general characteristics. The present chapter, then, will be devoted to an examination of the implications of the experiential character of real Being; in the next, we shall deal with the nature of its unity as a single system.