Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/70

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The conception of organised experience, in the limited and relative form in which the special sciences possess it, is unquestionably through and through a conception that for us men, as we are, has a social origin. No man, if isolated, could develope the sort of thoughtfulness that would lead him to appeal from experience as it comes to him to experience as it ideally ought to come, or would come, to him in case he could widely organise a whole world of experience in clear relation to a single system of conceptions. Man begins his intelligent life by imitatively appealing to his fellow's experience. The life-blood of science is distrust of individual belief as such. A common definition of a relatively organised experience is, the consensus of the competent observers. Deeper than our belief in any physical truth is our common-sense assurance that the experience of our fellows is as genuine as our own, is in actual relation to our own, has present to it objects identical with those that we ourselves experience, and consequently supplements our own. Apart from our social consciousness, I myself should hold that we men, growing up as we do, can come to have no clear conception of truth, nor any definite power clearly to think at all. Every man verifies for himself. But what he verifies, — the truth that he believes himself to be making out when he verifies,