Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/16

8 as facts of his experience. And accepting experience in this large empirical way, we must admit as objects of it, facts which could not be presented, which could not, perhaps, even exist. And because the point is so fundamental, let me repeat myself.

Every one would say that the presence of his fellows was given to him in experience. We should all instinctively pronounce it the idlest of philosophical vagaries, were I to devote time and paragraphs to proving that this paper is addressed to a real circle of readers, and if I were really in any doubt about it I should be declared simply insane.

Yet we do seriously discuss how we come to believe in the presence of other selves, and how we can rationally justify the belief. There is something a little futile, perhaps even a little insincere, in such discussion. We do not ‘come to believe’ in other selves at all. It is misleading to inquire into our ‘belief in other selves. Other selves are simply facts,—not reality-facts, perhaps, but experience-facts. Our belief (if I may still use the word) in other selves is in no proportion to our success in explaining or rationalizing the belief. In this effort we may succeed, or we may fail; our neighbor is in either case an equally genuine fact in our experience. Yet the essential part of this fact, the life of feeling and ideas and will, all, indeed, that makes him our neighbor, we can not possibly perceive. But the presence of it all about us is so much a fact of experience that without it any one would probably go mad. Whatever the psychological process may be by which human experience becomes social, it has, from the earliest times we can remember, the social character.

The fellow being is one type of an object of experience that can not be presented to perception. Another type is the past event.

Suppose I say to some one, ‘Did you go to any of the operas last winter?’ And I receive the answer, ‘Yes, I did go’; and I reply, ‘Are you quite sure? Perhaps you didn’t.’ I may be answered as follows: ‘I distinctly remember going. I remember all about it. I can tell you just who sang and where my seat was.’ The declaration amounts to saying that it is a fact of present experience that one did go to the opera some time ago. Surely it is a fact of present experience to each of us that he has done many particular things on days that are past. Yet we are not now doing the individual things we did yesterday. Facts of experience these past events are. Presented immediate facts they are not. We have, to be sure, immediate data about them, but the past event is obviously never presented in experience at all. Mental images, recollections, echoes of its sense, character, may be presented, but these are not the original event, and there may conceivably have been no original event.