Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/288

Rh insight in this region. How can the one form of Being be thus ambiguous, unless, in constitution, it is also much wealthier in nature than the mere abstraction expressed in our Third Conception makes it seem. Or, to put the case otherwise, the Third Conception of Being, in defining possibilities of experience, tells you only of mere abstract universals. But a mere universal is so far a bare what. One wants to make more explicit the that, to find something individual.

And, if you pass from mathematics to the physical instances of the third conception, and to the world of moral and social validity, it is of course true that every Being in heaven or in earth exists for you as determining a valid possibility of experience. But countless of these valid possibilities exist for you precisely as possibilities not yet tested by you, and therefore never to be tested. Herein lies the very essence of prudence, of generalizing science, and of moral choice, viz., in the fact that you recognize much experience as possible only to avoid it, and to refrain from verifying in your own person the valid possibility. But what is a mere possibility when not tested? Is it a mere internal meaning? Then where is its Truth? Is it external? Then what is its Being?

These were, in sum, our difficulties in regard to the Third Conception of Being. Their solution, logically speaking, lies now very near. But for us the road must still prove long. Meanwhile, the formulation of all these difficulties may be condensed into the single question, the famous problem of Pontius Pilate, What is Truth? For the Third Conception of Being has reduced Being to