Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/72

64 The idealist is prepared to handle this difficulty, by declaring that the relation of one object to two subjects is a mythical relation. Of course there is in one universe room for only one self, and when your experience and mine and the object are all abs<jrbed into this absolute experience, we get the one-subject-one-object relation back again. Do we indeed know of any experience analogous to the absorption of the experience of me and my fellows into one, in such a way as to comprehend them both, yet leave to each its individuality? On a small and trivial scale, we do. If I seize some object, a book, with both hands, the book which I grasp with my right hand is the same book as the one I grasp with my left. There is for the experience of grasping simply the one experienced object, because the touch-sensations of both hands, and the visual elements in the total perception are all brought together in one experience. For the same reason, the space through which my right hand swings is a part of the same space as that through which my left hand swings. In cases of alternating personality, in what intelligible empirical sense is the world of one of these selves the same world as that of the other self? The illustration of grasping the book shows that any external object can be kept one by defining it as the object within one experience. This logical necessity contradicts, of course, the plain testimony of pure experience, and as pure experience is the sole ground of good theory, and as logical contradictions proceed from definitions, one is justified in suspecting that the idealistic implications are begged somewhere in a definition. But realism can certainly have no logical standing until this petitio is pointed out.

But whatever means we resort to to explain experience, we adopt some concept and attach to it the existential predicate and seek thus to deproblematize the situation. We are seeking an experience with the fidential-character, the character of Heimhaftiakeit,' as Avenarius called it, and, in fact, the presence of ultimate problems is often testified to in language that breathes an acute tone of Heimweh.' The search for truth is indeed the search for a satisfied will, but the truth which we find may remain the truth for ten minutes or for a lifetime.

But science, too, seeks to deproblematize a situation by means of a concept, only science does not attach the existential predicate. Just in this matter of the existential judgment, metaphysics goes beyond science. Science does not deny that there is an ultimate truth, but she does not claim to have found it. She is very likely to say that it can not be found. Science has a system of concepts of which the necessary consequences are images of the actual effects and expressions of the ultimate ground of things. Science