Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/299

280 in so far as it deals merely with universal truths, can never hope, by any conceivable skill in construction, to replace the more empirical sciences, and merely to define the world in terms of its own sort of universal validity. For every step of the process is a cutting-off indeed of false possibilities, and an assertion of what therefore seems the more precisely and determinately limited range of the valid possibilities. But at every step, also, the range beyond is simply inexhaustible, so far as you take your object as merely external. Unless some other principle than that of mere negation determines the realm of valid Being, then it has no final determination at all. Looking beyond, to that realm of external meanings, we say: A is never B. Well then, comes the retort, What is it? So far, the answer is, ''Whatever else is still possible. Is it C then?'' A further reasoning process perhaps excludes this, or some other, possibility also. Have we found out the positive contents of Being? No, we have only again excluded. And so we continue indefinitely, not only with an infinite process upon our hands, but with no definite prospect as to positive consequences to be won by exhausting even this infinity. This is the essential defect of “merely reasoning,” in abstractly universal terms, about the external nature of things.

But all this has, indeed, another aspect. This negative character of the universal judgments holds true of them, as we have said, just in so far as you sunder the external and the internal meanings, and just in so far as you view the Real as the Beyond, and as merely the Beyond. If you turn your attention once more to the