Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/14

Rh after a fashion not unknown amongst people who think themselves to be “pure” empiricists, will of course know, quite a priori and absolutely, that there is nothing absolute to be known. Not for such critics, who may be left where God has placed them, but for still open-hearted inquirers, I may as well say, however, that, to my mind, the only demonstrable truths of an ultimate philosophy relate to the constitution of the actual realm of Experience, and to so much only about the constitution of this realm as cannot be denied without self-contradiction. Whenever, in dealing with Experience, we try to find out what, on the whole, it is and means, we philosophize. Our goal is reached, so far as the demonstrable truth is concerned, whenever we have found a series of propositions relating to the constitution of the realm of experience, and such that, as soon as you try to deny these propositions, you implicitly reaffirm them by your very attempt at denial. After you have found these propositions, you have, of course, a right to use them, more or less effectively, as a partial basis for special applications and results which will indeed remain, like all our human knowledge of particulars, more or less hypothetical. But your hypotheses about particular problems must be judged by themselves. Your body of central truth is subject only to the test just mentioned. And you call this truth “absolute” merely because you conceive that it bears this test. Whether it does so is a question of fact, not of authority. And every man must, in such a matter, look for himself before judging about what is offered to him.

As to the principal special features of this discussion,