Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/262

Rh snow, is a possible experience, when you have once proved that possibility in no provisional sense. For such possibilities, once recognized, are viewed as really valid and objective physical characters of air or of snow or of the earth. And now, finally, you may once more see what we summarized at the outset, namely, how this conception must on the whole stand related to theology and to religion.

The partisans of our third notion of the real have, indeed, as we have observed, a stately tradition behind them. They can well assert that they are not mere sceptics or destroyers of faith. Yet a theology that has been deeply influenced by this conception will no longer share the realist's absolute dogmatic assurance, whether positive or negative, nor yet the mystic’s inexpressible communion with his ineffable and immediate truth. Our critical rationalist lives in a world where nothing in the realistic sense is real, but where it is as if there were independent realities, which, when more closely examined, prove to be merely more or less valid and permanent ideas. The truth, whether transient or eternal, always arouses in such a world a twofold response or reaction in us who observe it. It imposes its presence upon us as if it were an independent reality; and hereupon we submit. But then it alters its countenance as we consider it critically, and becomes more and more like a mere product of our point of view, a mere creation of our experience and our thought. And hereupon we wonder. This truth seems to be at first an individual fact. But it transforms itself as we watch it into an universal principle. After we have watched such changes awhile, we begin to question