Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/279

260 our concrete human experience, but is interesting to us precisely because we can select from its wealth of possibilities those that we wish, as we say, to realize. Now what our Third Conception so far fails to explain to us is precisely the difference between the reality that is to be attributed to the valid truths that we do not get concretely verified in our own experience, and the reality observed by us when we do verify ideas.

In brief, What is a valid or a determinately possible experience at the moment when it is supposed to be only possible? What is a valid truth at the moment when nobody verifies its validity? When we ourselves find the possible experience, it is something living, definite, — yes, individual. When we ourselves verify a valid assertion, it is again something that plays a part in our individual process of living and observing. But when we speak of such truths as barely valid, as merely possible objects of experience, they appear once more as mere universals. Can these universals, not yet verified, consistently be regarded as possessing wholeness of Being?

Or again, we formerly criticised Realism and Mysticism alike because neither of them sufficiently took account of the fact that our ideas of Being and the Being of which we have ideas, must occupy essentially the same ontological position. If, as Realism had said, Being is real independently of ideas, we saw that then ideas are themselves realities independent of Being. And if, as Mysticism had said, ideas are unreal, we saw that the Absolute, which Mysticism undertook to seek, must be unreal in the same sense in which the ideas