Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/184

Rh is superior to all reflection. One does not first reason towards any realistic result. One just feels the world to be independent, as one feels red to be red. Others teach that this evidence, although certain and unquestionable, is “mediate,” or in other words is an evidence that comes by means of a certain process of interpreting facts in accordance with principles, or of reasoning from data. The teachers of this latter thesis, again, vary in their expressions. Some declare that the certainty of the independent reality of the object-world is mediated by a general and a priori “intuition” of some sort, a principle more or less obviously innate, whose deliverance is the unquestionable assertion that there must be some external basis, some independent truth, behind the mere fact of consciousness. Others appeal to a character found each time afresh, in the individual data of perception, but experienced as having a mediate or indirect significance. This character is a certain tendency of the experienced facts to refer beyond themselves, not by virtue of any general intuition on the part of the knowing subject, but by virtue of a stamp or mark of “reference” which some of the data themselves empirically possess, just as one’s desires are often said to be experienced as referring to their own, perhaps distant, fulfilment. One experiences the presence of this “reference” in each new fact of external experience. Others, still, declare that we first experience, within ourselves, the genuine though limited efficacy of our own active wills in directing some of our own states, and that, hereupon, perceiving that this efficacy is limited, that this inner