Page:The Function of Reason.pdf/74

 tax. We should also consider the institutions of mankind in the light of an embodiment of their stable experience.

In the search for categoreal notions sufficiently general to figure in a cosmological morphology, we must lay stress on those factors in experience which are “stable.” By this it is meant that the discerning of them as illustrated in fact is not confined to a few special people, or a few special occasions. The illustration must rest on broad, widespread testimony.

Here a distinction must be made. The first discernment may be due to an exceptional man in an exceptional moment. But a secret which cannot be shared, must remain a secret. The categoreal forms should come to us with some evidence that they are widespread in experience. But we are now considering the main difficulty of the speculative Reason, its confrontation with experience.

There is a conventional view of experience, never admitted when explicitly challenged, but persistently lurking i in the tacit presuppositions. This view conceives conscious experience as a clear-cut knowledge of clear-cut items with clear-cut connections with each other. This is the conception of a trim, tidy, finite experience uniformly illuminated. No notion could be further from the truth. In the first place the equating of experience with clarity of knowledge is against the evidence. In our own lives, and at any one moment, there is a focus of attention, a few items in clarity of awareness, but