Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/304

Rh such predeterminations involve more than the assertion that Being, as thus predetermined, excludes and forbids certain of the ideal constructions that, at first, seem possible. But what Being, in so far as it is merely Other and external, positively contains, we cannot thus discover.

How else shall we attempt to discover this desired fulfilment of our purpose? The ordinary answer is, By external experience. Now this so-called external experience is never what you might call “Pure Experience.” For only the mystic looks for Pure Experience wholly apart from ideas. And we already know what he finds. He is the only thoroughgoing Empiricist; and he has his reward. What is usually called “Experience,” by common sense or by science, is not purely immediate content, and it is not whatever happens to come to hand. It is carefully and attentively selected experience. It is experience lighted up by ideas. They, as our internal meanings, are incomplete, and they therefore take the form of asking questions. They formulate ideal schemes, and then they inquire, Have these schemes any correspondent facts, yonder, in that externally valid object? The very question is full of ideal presuppositions, which one in vain endeavors to renounce by calling himself a pure empiricist. Unless he is a mystic he is no such pure empiricist. And if he is a mystic, he abhors ideas and frames no hypotheses, except for the sake of merely teaching his doctrine in exoteric fashion. But a scientific empiricist has hypotheses, internal meanings, ideal constructions, — and he deliberately chooses to submit these to the control of what he views as external experience. If you ask why he does