Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/309

290 seeks to enlarge its realm. And in doing so one appeals to what is called the external experience; and hereupon one makes those particular judgments which are the typical expression of our human sort of external experience. But this is experience so far as it has not yet fused with the internal meanings; but so far as, nevertheless, through selection and through patient effort, it can gradually be brought to the point where it decides ideal issues. As other than the ideas, this experience is said to be the evidence and the expression of the external objects themselves. Yet these objects, for the awakened reason, are no longer “things in themselves.” Their contrast with the world of “mere ideas” is, indeed, here insisted upon; but we have plainly, so far, no final account of what the contrast is.

Yet there remains one further aspect of this whole situation of our judging thought, — an aspect upon which sufficient stress has not been laid. We have said, as against this Third Conception of Being, that at best it leaves Reality too much a bare abstract universal, and does not assert the individuality of Being. We have still to express this objection in a more formal way. As we have seen, all our universal and particular judgments leave Reality, in a measure, indeterminate. Can we tolerate this view of Reality as final?

Ideas, as such, take, we have said, the abstractly universal form. External experience, as such, in this realm where we find it sundered from the internal meanings, confirms or refutes ideas in particular cases. But do