Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/383

364 here experience your experience. If you assert that my experience is real, you in fact mean to transcend what your present finite experience presents to you. And neither your present fragment of experience can be directly used to verify the fact that my experience exists, nor can my fragment of momentary experience itself be used to verify the fact that you are thinking of me at all, or are referring to me, or are even meaning to assert my existence. And, in the same way, it is not a present fact of any man’s momentary finite experience that the body of fact called the combined experience of humanity, or of science, or of any group of men, great or small, exists. Whoever asserts, then, that human experience exists, as a body consisting of the many experiences of various human observers, asserts what no finite human observer ever has, at any moment, experienced. For I insist, no man ever yet at any instant himself observed that mankind as a body, or that any man but himself, was observing facts.

Yet more, no man, at any one of our temporal human instants, ever then and there empirically verifies the existence even of his own past experiences. For, by definition, his past experiences are over, and are irrevocably no longer present, at any present empirical moment. No man, then, has ever observed the empirical fact that he himself has in the past observed facts, or has acquired by experience this which he now views as his own personally possessed body and outcome of experience.

Therefore, let no one who says, in a realistic sense, “Human experience, the experience of many men, exists,”