Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/188

Rh as quite independent of my present hopes and of my present regrets. The latter are experiences that imply a reference to what both transcends them and is true independently of them. But this transcendent and independent reality of past or of future is still not the realist’s Ding an sich, but is a content of experience. Finally, when I converse with another man, and suppose myself to be comprehending what he says, my experiences refer beyond themselves to a reality supposed by me to have an aspect quite independent of my experience, but this independence is still only the independence belonging to an experience other than mine, namely, my fellow’s experience.

When an experience refers beyond itself, it may, then, be referring to “other experience, actual and possible, not here presented.” Mysterious as all such reference appears when first critically examined, there can be no doubt of the presence and of the frequency of just such forms of appeal to the “transcendent.” There can also be no doubt, that every such appeal from one moment of consciousness to other experience, actual and possible, presents itself as a reference to a reality. The past and the future, my neighbour’s mind, and the whole range of the “genuine possibilities” of experience, — these are, for any moment of experience that refers to any of them, as really “independent” realities, which one knows or does not know, truly