Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/202

Rh maintain. I should indeed prefer to say that what you call ‘possibilities’ exist beyond experience as grounds of possibility, unknown natures of things, which determine in advance what our experience shall be when it comes. Such a fashion of statement appears to me a franker admission of the inevitable transcendence.” And our half-idealist can now only retort once more: “But what do you mean by the beyond, whether of the possibility or of its ground, known or unknown? Tell what you mean, and this beyond becomes no longer unknown, no longer transcendent. It becomes content of experience.” And thus the endless conflict may go on.

Now, what possible way of escape is there from this dilemma? I submit: The half-idealist must become a thoroughgoing idealist or nothing. He must assert: “Beyond experience there is, if anything, further experience.” And this further experience, so he must assert, is just as concrete, just as definite, as our own, and is real in the same sense in which our own is real. The proof that such experience exists beyond our own must rest, for the true idealist, in the first place, upon just the considerations that lead both half-idealist and realist to assert that our own experience, as something fragmentary, cannot be accepted alone, but implies its own complement. More deeply stated, the thesis of the idealist must be: — That our experience, as essentially imperfect, that is, as not fulfilling the very ideas which we ourselves have acquired in presence of this experience, demands from us statements as to whether these ideas are truly fulfilled or not. For instance, we have an