Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/85

 THE DISTINCTION OF INNER AND OUTER EXPERIENCE. 71 there seems to be no valid reason why one should not admit that our so-called external experience involves the presence to our consciousness of manifold spiritual substances which are subjects at lower planes of development. A transsubjec- tive real is inferentially necessary to explain external experi- ence ; and as we construe this real in terms of spirit and not of matter we cannot be accused of setting up a dualism which makes knowledge inexplicable. The constructive work of thought has been already referred to. But thought cannot weave out of itself the content of experience. Some- thing must be given, and the requisite fundamenta relationis are supplied by individual reals, by everything which pos- sesses a degree of inner life and is for itself as well as for others. On this hypothesis we do justice to the primacy and centrality of the inner life, while we avoid the absurdity of reducing external experience to thought-relations, or of positing un- knowable "things in themselves" behind the phenomena of sense. We are now in a position to deal with a point of some importance which bears on the distinction of inner and outer. We mean the spatial reference which the distinction suggests. It may be assumed here that neither space nor time can be an empty form having a real existence which is somehow applied to things. 1 They must, therefore, be in some way developed out of the content of experience itself : though not real in themselves they must be evolved from some basis in reality, or to use a phrase employed by Leibniz, they must be phenomena bene fundata. This point of reference to reality can only be found in the interaction of those individual reals which are the ground of experience. The mutual determina- tion of different spiritual substances would be represented from the standpoint of the perceiving subject under the form of space. And inasmuch as all experience must be construed in terms of the states of a subject for which both itself and other selves exist, we have time as the universal form in which the subject represents everything that happens. The long history of experience and the generalisation which is its outcome have served to invest space and time with a seeming reality and independence of their own. Only the unwork- able nature of this conclusion and the contradictions in which it involves him, shake a man's natural faith in an opinion which seems so well founded. It would be too much to say that the theory we accept satisfactorily solves every difficulty, but it avoids a twofold error. For it treats neither space nor 1 Vide, Lotze, Metaphysics, bk. ii., chaps, i., iii.