Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/381

362 this idea was verified by astronomical observation; for the predicted planet was later observed. So Neptune is a reality. But the heavenly spheres of an older astronomy proved to be mere ideas, since advancing experience proved to be inconsistent with the ideas in. question. So in science and in life, it is experience which decides that any supposed Being, whose what an idea defines, exists. Away, then, with your hope of finality. Experience is fragmentary, growing, and finite. And Being is only known through experience.”

So far the objector. I reply, in a way already indicated at the last lecture. I myself doubt not in the least that the realm of experience is, and is decisive of truth. I doubt not this, simply because our Fourth Conception declares that what is real is an experience presenting the fulfilment of the whole purpose of ideas.

Nur in der Erfahrung ist Wahrheit, said Kant. I not only accept this thesis, but insist upon it. I know of no truth that is not an empirical truth, whatever further character it also possesses. An idea, according to our original definition, is already a fragment of experience although partially fulfilling a purpose. The fulfilment of an idea could not possibly take any form that was not also empirical. Neither God nor man faces any fact that has not about it something of the immediacy of a sense datum. That is for my conception a logical necessity. For what finite ideas seek is expression, embodiment, life, presence. Experience then is real. Ay, but what experience? And above all, in what sense is experience real? What kind of Being has experience? This question must be answered by any one who glibly asserts that