Page:Appearance and Reality (1916).djvu/340

 makes part of my experience at all. I do not see, in short, how anything can come there, unless it is prepared, from some side, to enter and to take its place there. And, if it is not to be an element in experience, it will be nothing. And I doubt if any one would urge a claim so suicidal and so absurd, unless for the sake of, and in order to defend, a preconceived doctrine. Because phenomena in time are not real, there must be something more than temporal. But because we wrongly assume that nothing is real, unless it exists as a thing, therefore the element, which transcends time, must be somehow and somewhere beside it. This element is a world, or a soul, or an Ego, which never descends into our series. It never comes down there itself, though we are forced, I presume, to say that it works, and that it makes itself felt. But this irrational influence and position results merely from our false assumption. We are attempting to pass beyond the series, while we, in effect, deny that anything is real, unless it is a member there. For our other world, and our soul, and our Ego, which exist beside temporal events, have been taken themselves as but finite things. They merely reduplicate phenomena, they do but double the world of appearance. They leave on our hands unsolved the problem that vexed us before, and they load us beside with an additional puzzle. We have now, not only another existence no better than the first, but we have to explain also how one of these stands to, or works on, the other. And the result is open self-contradiction or thoughtless obscurity. But the remedy is to purge ourselves of our groundless prejudice, and to seek reality elsewhere than in the existence of things. Continuity and identity, the other world and the Ego, do not, as such, exist. They are ideal, and, as such, they are not facts. But none the less they have reality, at least not inferior to that of temporal events. We must admit that, in the full sense,