Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/280

Rh about it are unreal. Now the former criticism of Realism and of Mysticism must once more be applied to test the adequacy of our present conception. We must see whether validity means the same in our experience as it means when asserted of Being in general. Validity, so far as it has yet appeared in our account, is an ambiguous term. As applied to the ideas that we actually test, it means that they are concretely expressed in experience whenever we test them. As applied to the whole realm of valid truth in general, to the world of nature as not yet observed by us, or of mathematical truth not now present to us, it means that this realm somehow has a character that we still do not test, and that never gets exhaustively presented in our human experience. But what is this character?

Or, once more, in our concrete experience, the validity of an idea, once seen, tested, presented, gets what we then regard as an individual life and meaning, since it appears in our individual experience. But in the realm of Being in general this same validity appears universal, formal, — a mere general law. Now can this view be final? Can there be two sorts of Being, both known to us as valid, but the one individual, the other universal, the one empirical, the other merely ideal, the one present, the other barely possible, the one a concrete life, the other a pure form? Is not the world real in the same general sense in which our life in the world is real? Can Critical Rationalism escape the test already applied to its rivals? And if the test is applied, must not all Being prove to be pulsating with the same life of concrete experience?