Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/382

Rh experience is. Now it seems strange to find that while many a man laughs to hear how some of the earlier scholastics supposed that not dogs and lions and men, but the canine nature, and leoninity in general, and humanity in the abstract are real, — still this same man will appeal to an ideal authority called Experience in general, — a mere universal idea so far, — as decisive of what is real, or as itself the reality. As a fact, only individual experience is real, be that the experience of man or God. And whoever asserts: “The reality is experience,” has precisely those alternatives to face about the sense in which experience is real which have been discussed in the foregoing general account of the problem of Being. There are in the world the experiences of men.

Granted. But are these experiences facts whose Being is wholly independent of the ideas whereby we now assert that these experiences are real? If we assert this, then, our empiricism becomes simply one form of Realism. It now defines the what of our world as experience; but the that it defines, not at all merely in empirical terms, but rather in realistic terms, namely as a form of Being independent of our ideas, in so far as these ideas refer to the reality of this experience. A realistic empiricist, therefore, if you look closer, explicitly transcends the very finite experience that he declares to be the only test of truth.

For consider: Suppose that you say that the experience of mankind is a real fact, and is what it is, whatever the metaphysical dreamers say about it. Now as a finite being, confined to this instant, you do not experience my experience, nor in the same finite sense do I now and