Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/198

Rh sible experience” has already included and defined. If, by saying that an experience, p, needs an explanation in the existence of some fact x, which stands to p in the relation R, one refers to a relation R identical with an already known and experienced relation, one inevitably implies the assertion: “If the fact p were properly known, it would be experienced as in the relation R to x”; and hereupon x, as well as p, must be viewed as the object or content of a possible experience. Thus x ceases to be anything that we have so far regarded as a transcendent object. But if one regards the relation R itself as a transcendent relation, a new mediating relation, R', is needed to make valid any argument for the transcendent reality of the first relation R; and an infinite regress becomes necessary.

The first argument of the realist accordingly fails. But he has ready a second and more cogent consideration. Instead of permitting this x to become essentially a fact of experience as before, by virtue of the conception of the real as the “content of possible experience,” he now directly undertakes to use this latter conception as an argument for his own, and to absorb whatever is implied by a “content of possible experience” in his own notion.

This second and more cogent realistic argument runs as follows: It has been admitted by the supposed opponent of Realism that he himself is unable to state in terms of experience that is altogether concrete and actual, or that, in other words, is the experience of somebody in particular, the whole constitution of the truth to which he appeals. He is