Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/277

258 can find involved in very many of your statements about the Being of social and of physical realities. Having defined such ideas of possible experience, you then test them. If the result conforms to the expectation, you are so far content. You have then communed with Being. The Other that was sought appears to have been found.

But no, it is not wholly right to view the matter merely thus. For there are countless possible experiences that you never test, and that you still view as belonging to the realm of physical and of social validity. In fact, just when you express your own contentment with your tests, you transcend what you have actually succeeded in getting present to your experience. The ship has for you, even as a merely valid object in the context of Kant’s Mögliche Erfahrung, more Being than you have ever directly verified. If it had not, you would indeed call it a figment of imagination. The prices and credits of the commercial world involve far more numerous types of valid possible experience than any prudent merchant cares to test; for, if these facts are valid as they are conceived, their very Being includes possibilities of unwise investment and of bankruptcy, which the prudent business man recognizes only to avoid. In fact, since our whole voluntary life is selective, we all the time recognize possibilities of experience only to shun the testing of them.

And so, in sum, the ordinary world of possible experience has this twofold character. We prove that it is there by testing empirically, from moment to moment, the validity of our ideas about it; but our very belief in its