Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/71

Rh that of course he did not really believe it, that he suggested this reply in order to observe what the logical results might be. And as for the few who might make this reply in all sincerity, some of these would save the transcendent character of Calcutta by declaring it to be an object in an eternal experience, and the others would, I am sure, feel that something was wrong, and that the transcendent character should be gotten back somehow. The 'dualistic discontent' makes itself felt when we undertake to define the world as a series of dissolving views. And yet why not? That is the way the world flows by before us. One view melts into another with enough consistency and a good deal of predictability.

But we will none of such sophistry. The changing view is all characterized as more than view. The realistic bias so characteristic of our human nature demands permanence and stability. Moreover, one might feel obliged to be consistent and thoroughgoing, and then our fellows would dissolve away together with the views to which they belong, and against this we set a subborn face. But the material outer world is probably able to take care of itself even without the help of the fellow being; our reality- functions see to it that the world remains, even in idealism, a transcendent object, so far as any one finite mind is concerned.

The transcendence-character must somehow be preserved, for it is preserving it to translate it into something permanent in an experience, which is outside the limits of what I recognize just now as mine. This motive is contributed by the outer world character of experience. Another important motive there is in the fellow being, not so much in the external aspect he presents by appearing in the outer world, as by his being a fellow. As such, he is the condition of all our ethical attitudes, and of everything that gives the deeper value and significance to life. His presence lays a significant demand upon the outer world. External objects must be the same objects for him and for me. That is made the test of their reality as external objects. But most important of all is it that the fellow being remain a transcendent object. Yet how, then, can there be one and the same outer world for us both? It would seem as though his outer world must exist in a different space from mine and in a different time. In fact, it seems as though in one universe there were room for only one self. This is really, it seems to me, the clinching argument for idealism, and it is one that the critics of that doctrine, and those who prove to us the actual transcendent existence of the world, hardly notice. These philosophers take all their illustrations from a one-object-one-subject relation, whereas the case of realism can not be proved without making clear the one-object-two-subjects relation.