Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/305

286 so, he answers, very rightly, that he has no other road open to the grasping of yonder “external object.” But this answer means more than an empiricist of this type usually observes. Wholly inconsistent with any abstract Realism (which is always metempirical in its actual assumptions), the wish of the ordinary empiricist, however highly trained his scientific judgment, and however steadfast his assurance that the idea and its valid object are somehow sundered aspects of Being, is always simply to enrich his internal meanings by giving them a selective control which, of their own moving, they cannot find. Or, in the ordinary phraseology, Man thinks in order to get control of his world, and thereby of himself. What the bare internal meanings, in their poverty, leave as an open question, the external experience shall decide. If you ask, again, What experience? the answer always is, Not any experience that you please, but a sort of experience determined by the question asked, viz., whatever experience is apt to decide between conflicting ideas, and to determine them to precise meaning.

It is customary to dwell upon the “crushing character,” the “overwhelming power” of “stubborn empirical facts.” The character in question is, of course, a valid one. Yet this crushing force of experience is never a barely immediate fact; it is something relative to the particular ideas in question. For, as I must repeat, our so-called external experience, that is, our experience taken as other than our meanings, and viewed as what confirms or refutes them here or there, never does more, in any question concerning the truth, than to decide our ideal issues, and to decide them in particular instances, whose character and