Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/212

198 ence and alleged or imagined experience to an extreme point, when he asks "What right have we [if the harmony of present and past experience is a test of reality] e.g., to reject countless traditions in order to prove that miracles are 'contrary to experience'?" Traditions are not "past experiences"; they are the alleged experiences of other people and of people, moreover, who are conveniently out of the way and cannot be put in the witness-box and cross-questioned. If the test of "absence of conflict with present and verifiable experience" be rejected, we are unable even to begin the scientific examination of the credibility of tradition. With an opponent who denies that scientific history is possible, philosophical argument is indeed difficult.

Admitting the practical importance of the test of "intimate and continuous connection with my life" (Prof. James's words, expressing part of what I meant by coherence between present and past experience), Mr. Schiller says "there may be much doubt about its speculative value" (p. 540). In all matters many practical tests that are valid up to a certain point break down beyond that point, even for the purposes of more careful practice. But to suppose an ultimate and irreconcilable discrepancy between practical value and speculative truth implies a philosophical scepticism that renders profitable discussion impossible. I should certainly distrust any "approach to the ultimate reality of things" which began with the removal of the only criterion that we can possibly have of any reality whatever.

Mr. Schiller wonders why I did not mention along with the tests of coherence in experience the test of "conformity to the necessary laws of thought." I did not do so, because it is not the plain man's way of putting the test but the scientific man's, and a reference to my article will show that I reserved the scientific sense of reality for my third head. [The analyst of the in Mind (New Series, I. p. 439), has similarly failed to note my divisions. The words which he quotes, "A thing really is – that way of thinking about it which fits it into its place in an intelligible system of the universe" are not put forward as my own answer to the question "What is reality?" They only represent what (so far as I can understand) the scientific man means by reality when he translates the ordinary man's "real world" into a series of thought-conceptions (universal laws of nature, etc.). They would indeed be very inadequate as a philosophical answer to the question; for, as my critic points out, they do not take account of the antithesis between