Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/276

Rh instant’s experience. Reasoning is an empirical process, whatever else it also is. One who observes the nature of a realm of abstractly possible experience, does so by reading off the structure of a presented experience. Necessity comes home to us men through the medium of a given fact. This is the general result of modern exact Logic. This is the outcome of the recent study of the bases of mathematical science.

And now, in a precisely similar way, the discovery of the more contingent, or, on occasion, of the more transient validity of the non-mathematical truths of the world of possible experience, has the same puzzling and twofold character. You examine, in the field or in the laboratory, a law of the physical world; you assure yourself that yonder ship observed out at sea is a reality; you find out the price of a commodity; you verify the credit of a business man. In any such case, what do you accomplish? What sort of Being do you assert, examine, establish? The answer is, — What you do is to test the validity of an idea about possible experience. You first predict that if you act so or so, if you watch the ship longer, if you make the scientific experiment under given conditions, if you offer the market price for the article, or if you attempt to negotiate the commercial paper, certain empirical results will follow, certain consequences will be experienced by you. This prediction is, for you, merely an assertion about possible perceptions, feelings, ideas. You will, under given conditions, see certain sights, hear certain words, touch certain tangible objects, — in brief, get the presence of certain empirical facts. This is all that you