Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/72

Rh sort of concrete experience? The social origin of the conception, as we mortals have come to get it, suggests in an ambiguous way both alternatives. The experience to which, as a social being, I first appeal when I learn to talk of truth, is the live actual experience of other men, which I, as an imitative being, primarily long to share, and which I therefore naturally regard as in many respects the norm for my experience. In society, in so far as I am plastic, my primary feeling is that I ought, on the whole, to experience what the other men experience. But in the course of more thoughtful mental growth, we have come to appeal from what the various men do experience to what they all ought to experience, or would experience if their experiences were in unity; that is, if all their moments were linked expressions of one universal meaning which was present to one Universal Subject, of whose insight their own experiences were but fragments. Such an ideally united experience, if it could but absolutely define its own contents, would know reality. And by reality we mean merely the contents that would be present to such an ideal unity of experience. But now, on this side, the conception of the ideally organised experience does indeed at first look like a mere ideal of a barely possible unity. The problem still is: Is this unity more than a bare possibility? Has it any such concrete genuineness as the life of our fellows is believed to possess?

Observe, however, that our question: Is there any such real unity of organised experience? is precisely equivalent to the question: Is there, not as a mere