Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/54

Rh Feeling is not yet truth. The problem: What does our experience indicate? implies in its very wording that the indication is not the result. And between the indication and the truth that experience indicates there actually lies the whole travail of the most abstruse science.

But the partisans of our present thesis continue their parable thus: This being true, — experience being the life-blood of our human knowledge, — it is a fact that our human experience is determined by our peculiar organisation. In particular, the specific energies of our sensory nerves determine our whole experience of the physical world. The visual centres get affected from without in such wise only that sensations of light accompany their excitement. The auditory centres respond to sensory disturbance in such wise only that we hear sounds. The physical fact beyond us never gets directly represented in our mental state; for between the physical fact and our experience of its presence lie the complex conditions that give our sensations their whole specific character. And what is true of our sensations is true of the rest of our experience. As it comes to us, this experience is our specific and mental way of responding to the stimulations which reality gives us. This whole specific way therefore represents, not the true nature of outer reality, so much as the current states of our own organisations. Were the outer reality, as it exists not for our senses but in itself, to be utterly altered, still our experience, so long as one supposed our organisation itself somehow to survive in a relatively unchanged form, might retain very many of its pres-