Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/210

Rh as one may continue, “there is nothing about the later judgments and their contents which of itself contains or explains this relation of reference of the later judgments to the same object. The object may, by hypothesis, be one that, in its time, was a presented content of experience. But neither the original object or content, nor the later judgments about it, can be said to contain, as parts, — that is, as facts of experience, — that relation of reference which makes them all judgments about the same facts. Still more impossible is it to reduce to any mere contents of human experience the relation that we have in mind when we say, or conceive, that, as a fact, many people can at the same time refer to the same objects, or, at various times, can think of the same objects. An idealist may undertake to say, as much as he pleases, that what, in its time, was called the Battle of Marathon was a mere mass of contents of experience in the minds of the Greeks and Persians concerned. He may try to deny that the swords, javelins, and horses present were in any sense transcendently real objects, external to anybody’s experience. But what the idealist cannot explain, or even express in his terms, is how various schoolboys to-day, various poets and orators in successive ages, various historians, scholars, archaeologists, can all think, read, learn, dispute, about the same event, namely, the Battle of Marathon itself. For the battle, when now thought of, is no longer presented experience for anybody. Nor (and this is of special importance) is one man’s inner thought or experience, which in him represents the Battle of Marathon, in the faintest degree identical with the thought