Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/87

Rh virtue of the functional activity of the perceiving subject, and that it is impossible to describe or conceive an object in other terms than those of consciousness, and that consequently to assume the existence of an object having other attributes is to assume nothing. And to assume that the object exists as consciousness is to define it as what is the private experience of one observer. When all experience and all objects of experience are defined as consciousness, no common object is possible. It is impossible that a father and a mother could refer to their child and each refer to the same object. Different selves are completely sundered existences.

Now this flies in the face of normal experience, but it is perfectly logical, granting the premises. The argument proceeds: different selves can not come together in any way or have any common objects. Two selves, therefore, can not occupy the same universe. And if we are to claim to live together at all in the same universe, this universe must be the total consciousness of one self, which integrates and absorbs all our various individual selves. My world and your world are the same because we are of it, and it is the consciousness of one self.

Now, since we do all the time claim to have objects in common, we appeal continually to a situation which, when examined, shows that every concrete human life is a fragment of an absolute consciousness.

To think of shattering such a work of art! It is like looting a temple. And yet, if the chair before me is not of the essentially private portion of experience, this grand and really spiritual fabric of the imagination dissolves away like the architecture of dreams. And then? Well, there is pure experience and the task of science is to describe it. What other kind of a world there could be except a world of pure experience I really can not imagine.

And here I apprehend disgust and disappointment. Is this idealism ashamed, or agnosticism skulking under a better name, or realism too timid to speak out? It is hard to answer; the 'radical empiricist' has learned something from each doctrine. I am not sure that the demand for existence distinguished from experience is an intelligible demand. But in saying that, I do not admit any flight to idealism or to any other of the traditional alternatives in metaphysics. My conviction, which, of course, I can not prove, is that metaphysics, in the sense hitherto most customary, has nearly finished its career. But there remains precisely the same kind of data, namely, experience characterized in one way or another, and the only legitimate method of dealing with it, namely, minute inspection by all available technique, and accurate description.