Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/380

Rh firm the ideas? That idea expresses Being which is found to be confirmed by experience. Upon this view of Being all sane science is founded. But this view excludes all a priori constructions, and all efforts to pierce the mysteries of the Absolute. Constructions of ideas about possibilities of experience are often allowable enough in science, as mere hypotheses, or as assertions about what is probable. But the test is the concrete, present, immediate experience of this or that observer. What has been seen, felt, or otherwise empirically encountered by some body, is in so far real. Nothing else is for us men knowable about the constitution of Being. Now when you talk about Being as a final fulfilment of ideas, and of human experience as a mere fragment of such a final fulfilment, you transcend human experience. Your view is too abstruse and artificial for plain men. We no longer seek, in these days, for any absolute or final Being. We believe what we find. Nothing final is experienced by men. The realm of the empirical is always, as you say, fragmentary. But then this is the only realm known to men. This alone is for us real. Ideas furnish us the what. Concrete experience alone can supply the that. I conceive in idea a horse. In experience I thereupon see, touch, drive, or buy and sell horses. Other men do the same. Hence horses are real. But I conceive of a fairy. My idea is perhaps vivid. But still I never see fairies, and I find that none but children and ignorant people fancy that they have seen fairies. So fairies remain unobserved, and so far appear to be unreal. The same rule holds in science. Neptune was first ideally conceived, but