Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/379

360 that something more than mere validity is real, — it is because of all these considerations that we define the fulfilment of the finite quests embodied in our present and partial ideas as the essential nature of Being.

So far, then, we have restated and developed our Fourth Conception of Being as the only one capable of defining how an idea can correspond to an object which is other than the idea, but which is still the very object consciously meant by the idea.

But now are there not perfectly natural objections to this conception? There are. They appear in both the before mentioned forms, — as assertions that our conception is too complex and abstruse for the plain-minded man, and as assertions that our definition is too simple for the complexities of the actual universe. Both sorts of objections, however, will prove to be welcome aids to the very comprehension of our conception of Being itself. Let me here begin with a very familiar form that an empirical objection to our theory may take.

“After all,” one may say, “you in vain endeavor, through your analysis of this or that conception of Being, to escape the conclusion of enlightened common sense that experience, and experience alone, determines what is and what is not. The whole question as to Being comes in the end to this: A man can frame ideas as he will, and as you say, ideas are indeed wilful enough constructions of merely conceived possibilities. But the question about Being always is, Does experience con-