Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/192

Rh fashion as to lead to the assumption of the transcendent objects. Conscious data are “appearances.” Appearances imply “Etwas das da erscheint.” Where there is so much smoke, there must be fire. Experience is the smoke. Only what transcends consciousness could be the fire, i.e., here, the logically intelligible basis of the appearances. Again, were there nothing transcendent, experience would be a dream, without even a dreamer. These various ways of attempting to show that the denial of the transcendent would involve a denial of a “necessary logical implication of the very existence of a world of appearance,” thus gradually pass, through the metaphor of the “dream,” to a stage where the “explanation” called for, the “implication” insisted upon, is rather teleological than either causal or logical. To deny the transcendently real world would be to make experience “meaningless,” by depriving it of “good sense,” by leaving no true difference between dream and waking, between science and madness. “Ein gesunder Realismus,” as some recent German writers love to call it, could alone so explain experiences as to give significance to our conscious data, which “amount to nothing” unless there are transcendent realities behind them. Hence, only the dreamy men of the closet can be idealists. Practical men, and men wide awake, believe in transcendent realities. In fact, it is more or less immoral not to believe in such transcendent realities. Thus in the end our realist may approach as nearly as you please to the arguments, and, as we shall see, to the theses, of Professor Howison.