Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/74

66 report it somewhat as I have done. Of course it takes an effort to mean by truth, error, and validity merely these characters of experience. The primitive realism which is such a sturdy growth within us causes us to try to mean something very different by truth, error and validity. But when we get these facts into our experience, what we have is experience, with the fidential character.

When we read the pages of certain philosophers of the past we can not doubt that to thera some objects were assured experienced facts, which to-day have to be proved by elaborate dialectical methods. Thus Descartes appeals to his idea of God as to the idea of something that could not possibly be doubted in any moment of sanity. Spinoza gives the impression even more strongly of being a man in whose experience God is an established and simply unquestionable reality. He could probably no more have doubted the existence of God than the 'plain man' doubts the existence of the outer world.

It seems hardly possible that the concept of God should appear in modern philosophical literature with the complete fidential character which it appears to have had with Descartes and Spinoza. But that does not mean that we have learned to question the existence of a ground of things back of phenomena. Philosophy still regards the visible and tangible world as a secondary quality of endless variety. We speak of change and the necessity of some ground of change, of fragmentary experience and the necessity of its completion, of thought and its 'Other' which exists even now before it is found as deproblematized experience.

As a mere suggestion, a hint, I recall the way in which Avenarius accounts for Idealism as a prevailing point of view in philosophy. The suggestion is that the search for an ultimate ground of experi^ ence, especially a spiritual ground with dramatic consequences, is a stirring of the old animistic habit within us.

But as to the motives which cause metaphysics to pass beyond science and attach the existential predicate to the useful concept, these may be many and different. We still hear now and then that the existence of God is assured in the necessity of a first cause. In reputable philosophical literature we do not now often meet with the concept of an efficient cause of the world, but the idea of a final cause lurks in all teleological metaphysics. The historical influence of the Christian conception of God would provide one motive for still seeking a ground of phenomena.

The intellectual interest in the dialectical problems, the exercise of thinking and of imagination, which is always attractive, and the sense of being engaged in very important undertakings, is another motive or group of motives.

As a statement of a third motive, I will quote a sentence from