Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/73

36 possibility, but as a genuine truth, any reality? The question: Is there an absolutely organised experience? is equivalent to the question: Is there an absolute reality? You cannot first say: There is a reality now unknown to us mortals, and then go on to ask whether there is an experience to which such reality is presented. The terms “reality” and “organised experience” are correlative terms. The one can only be defined as the object, the content, of the other. Drop either, and the other vanishes. Make one a bare ideal, and the other becomes equally such. If the organised experience is a bare and ideal possibility, then the reality is a mere seeming. If what I ought to experience, and should experience were I not ignorant, remains only a possibility, then there is no absolute reality, but only possibility, in the universe, apart from your passing feelings and mine. Our actual issue, then, is: Does a real world ultimately exist at all? If it does, then it exists as the object of some sort of concretely actual organised experience, of the general type which our science indirectly and ideally defines, only of this type carried to its absolute limit of completeness.

The answer to the ultimate question now before us — the question: Is there an absolutely organised experience? — is suggested by two very significant considerations. Of these two considerations, the first runs as follows:

The alternative to saying that there is such a real unity of experience is the assertion that such a unity is a bare and ideal possibility. But, now, there can be no such thing as a merely possible truth, definable