Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/539

523 I should answer that here, as elsewhere, the principle of the determinateness of the externally real is essentially founded upon the social consciousness. I experience through my sense any sort of flutterings, or of flickerings, or of cracklings, or of rattlings. So far, the question: Must numbers be determinate? arises, if at all, only to be negatived. In my feeling, there is present nothing but the sense of the vaguely countless multitude involved in each one of these experiences. But I go further. I say: This experience of mine stood for some fact that other observers could have verified. Verified? How? Nobody else can verify my star if I have only my inexpressible inner experience of its loveliness. Just so, nobody can verify with any exactitude my number if it is merely inexpressibly countless. As a fact, my fellow, standing by me, listening or looking at this flickering or crackling thing, may say that he too experiences something countless, just as I do. But alas! is his countless number the same as mine? Who can tell? We cannot imitate exactly the given indeterminate experience, and so proceed to verify it together, unless we do something to render the experience determinate. Thus one gets, in a relatively a priori fashion, the principles: (1) that my experience, as mine, may indeed, if left to itself, be an experience of an essentially indeterminate number; (2) that your experience, as yours, may be equally an experience of the countless; but (3) that our common experience, just in so far as it is ever to become verifiably common, must become an experience of the determinate, i.e., of the precisely imitable and communicable number. In advance of further light, we therefore say that the really objective physical event here, behind this flickering or crackling, must, as the supposed possible object of a common, of a communicable, of a socially verifiable experience, be regarded as already in itself determinate in number, however subjectively vague it now seems to be to each of us. Thus it is the definition of the physical world as the world, of our possible and socially communicable experiences, as distinct from the world of your or of my possible private experiences,—it is this principle of the social consciousness as determining