Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/384

Rh venture to add that he himself, or that any other man has, merely as man, empirically verified this assertion. It is false, then, to say that for such an assertion ideas furnish the what, and our human experience itself, in the form in which any man gets that experience, ever verifies the that. The assertion that a body of human experience exists, gets its that from some source not to be found in any one man’s experience at any time. Our realistic empiricist is, therefore, so far precisely like other realists. He transcends every man’s personal experience. He asserts the existence of independent Beings. He transcends all that any man ever has directly verified, or, as mere man, will at any instant ever verify. He is as transcendently metaphysical in his thesis as a Leibnitz or as a Herbart ever was in talking of Monads or of Reals. He can be decisively judged, however, only by the consistency of his ontological predicate. And we already know, in so far as he is a thoroughgoing realist, his fate.

For human experience, in so far as it is existent apart from our ideas which refer to it, is either something consciously meant by these ideas, or it is something not meant by them. If it is meant by them, it is either their whole real fulfilment in the form defined by our Fourth Conception; or else it is a part of just such a real final fulfilment. But, on the other hand, if it is something wholly independent in its existence of whether our private and momentary ideas refer to it or not; in other words, if it is a realm of facts whose type of Being is the realistic type, then in vain do you call it experience. Like any realistic Being, it is one whose existence cannot be referred to at all without the inconsistencies before