Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/165

146 moment when it is felt; and if such a sceptic, also talking of the real as the present, now insists that, for this very reason, your own search for the Mystic One is idle, since what empirically is felt, — now here and now there, — is not one, but many, and since, as such a Protagorean sceptic will assert, whoever feels anything whatever, has merely his own little share or case of immediate Being present to himself, — then even this apparently dangerous foe of the mystical faith meets with an easy answer, if once you have won the genuinely mystical spirit. For you in reply ask this critic whence he gets the assurance of the being of his various men, of his diverse experiences, of his many human feelings and points of view. Has he himself experienced immediately, or felt at any one moment what the supposed other real men and women feel? Has he himself ever felt anything purely immediate that involved two or more separate points of view? Is his direct experience that of many men? If he replies that common sense knows the many men with many minds, the countless feelings and points of view, to be real facts; then he has forsaken his own form of scepticism, even by his very appeal to commonly accepted truth. He returns to his illusions; you let him alone. If he declares that the many points of view are independently real facts of being, he is a realist, and is now already refuted. If he merely says that he is a sceptic because he feels that his feeling, although present, is not absolute, and that it is to him just now as if there were other points of view than his own, you reply, as a Mystic, that in thus confessing his scepticism to be identical with his dissatisfaction regarding his own present state, he confesses also that he is not lost in the presence of a satisfying