Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/316

Rh hypotheses about fact can be confirmed. But, on the other hand, while external experience, in confirming ideas, furnishes a positive content which our human internal meanings never can construct for themselves, still the service of our external experience, in revealing what is Real, has perfectly obvious limitations. It can confirm our hypotheses, but never adequately; for it shows us only particular instances that agree with such of our hypotheses as succeed. It can refute our hasty ideal generalizations, but only when they are stated as universal propositions. It can never by itself prove a determinate negative by excluding from Reality the whole of what our hypotheses have defined. Hence, our will has its limitless opportunity to “try again”; and external experience never finally disposes of ideas unless the ideas themselves make, for reasons defensible upon the ground of internal meaning only, their own “reasonable” surrender. And, finally, our experience, whether internal or external, never shows us what we, above all, regard as the Real, namely, the Individual fact. Hence, in consulting experience, we are simply seeking aid in the undertaking to give our ideas a certain positive determination, to this content and no other. But never, in our human process of experience, do we reach that determination. It is for us the object of love and of hope, of desire and of will, of faith and of work, but never of present finding.

This Individual Determination itself remains, so far, the principal character of the Real; and is, as an ideal, the Limit towards which we endlessly aim. Now, a Limit, in mathematics, may have either one or both of