Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/65

28 our actually fragmentary and stubbornly chaotic individual and momentary experience with a conceived world of organised experience, inclusive of all our fragments, but reduced in its wholeness to some sort of all-embracing unity. The contents and objects of this unified experience, we discover first by means of hypotheses as to what these contents and objects are, and then by means of verifications which depend upon a successful retranslation of our hypotheses as to organised experience into terms which our fragmentary experience can, under certain conditions, once more fulfil.

If, however, this is the work of all our science, then the conception of our human ignorance easily gets a provisional restatement. You are ignorant, in so far as you desire a knowledge that you cannot now get. Now, the knowledge you desire is, from our present point of view, no longer any knowledge of a reality foreign to all possible experience; but it is an adequate knowledge of the contents and the objects of a certain conceived or ideal sort of experience, called by you organised experience. And an organised experience would be one that found a system of ideas fulfilled in and by its facts. This sort of knowledge, you, as human being, can only define indirectly, tentatively, slowly, fallibly. And you get at it thus imperfectly, — why? Because your immediate experience, as it comes, is always fleeting, fragmentary. This is the sort of direct knower that you are, — a being who can of himself verify only fragments. But you can conceive infinitely more than you can directly verify. In thought