Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/406

390, but of the Absolute. The stock arguments for the position fail, however. The fact of experiencing is no proof of idealism, since reality, however independent, is only real for us as experienced. Reality is not wholly spiritual because the experiencing subject constitutes the object. They are equally necessary to each other and neither can claim priority. No real analogy exists between an absolute and an individual experience, and the supposed relation between the two can afford no real explanation of the latter. The variations in individual perception offered as proof of subjectivity, assume the permanent object of the perception. We may use the pragmatic test, and see how idealism works, if assumed. Reality is fundamentally my experience, but certain discordant elements in experience have been extruded, on volitional motives, into objectivity. We refused to accept experience where it was unpleasant, and the extrusion has proved successful. Were experience perfectly harmonious, it would admit of a solipsistic interpretation. Certain portions of our experience, viz., dreams, do, as a matter of fact, receive the solipsistic interpretation, because they are of inferior value for our purposes. Now, the independent objectivity ascribed to our waking experience is limited by the continuance of the successful postulate which created it, and the fact of dreams suggests doubt as to the finality of the postulate. Dreams reveal a highly complex world of subjective reality, the originality of which renders doubtful its imitative nature. Duration is not a factor in the question, and the fact of the discontinuance in dream-life is probably an empirical accident. As dream-life is judged subjective by waking life with its higher reality, so both may conceivably be transcended by a still higher reality which is thus suggested to us. Experience becomes ideal in the light of higher, more real experience. Reality could only be regarded as a dream from the standpoint of a higher reality. The reality of every experience is accepted until grounds for doubt arise. Our experience of an inharmonious universe gives rise to such doubt, and hints that it is the symbol of an unmanifest reality. In such a reality would be found the synthesis of idealism, in which all that is desired is realized, and of realism in which everything real is approved.

The view of Locke and Kant, and of modern philosophy in general, that consciousness is a sort of receptacle to be opposed to the objects in it, has proved itself to be thoroughly unfruitful. The distinction between consciousness and its objects is to be conceived, rather, as the distinction involved in the existence of different things together. Other examples of this type of existence are events in time, things in space, and individuals in a species. From this point of view, it becomes absurd to ask whether consciousness possesses causal efficiency, or how things get into