Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/58

Rh world. We happen to know, or at all events to believe that we know, concerning what our experience reveals and our science analyses, viz., concerning the so-called physical world, so much, that we can actually prove the inadequacy of our current sensations to reveal directly, or to present to us, physical truths that our science otherwise, and more indirectly, well makes out. The relatively indirect experience of science can and does correct the existent and unconquerable momentary ignorance of our senses. Indirect insight proves to be better, in some ways, than immediate feeling. To use Professor James’s more familiar terminology, we declare that we know about the physical world more than we can ever grasp by direct acquaintance with our sensations. And so, now, it is because we are supposed to know these things about the so-called reality, that we are aware of the limitations of our passing experiences. Thus viewed, the present statement of our limitations appears to be merely a correction of our narrower experience by the organised experience of our race and of our science. It tells us that we are ignorant, in one region of our experience, of what a wider experience, indirectly acquired, reveals to us.

The physiology of the senses, then, rightly viewed, does not assert that all our human experience is vainly subjective, including the very type of experience upon which the sciences themselves are founded. What science says is simply that there is a sort of indirect and organised experience which reveals more of phenomenal truth than can ever be revealed to our direct sensory states as these pass by. But our popu-