Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/385

366 observed. And in the end, like any other realistic Being, it is nothing at all.

Our empiricist may then take his choice. He is with us, or against us. If he is the latter, we have already dealt with him. For just so, if the experience to which our empiricist refers is the realm of the valid possibilities of experience, we already know its meaning and outcome. Conceive the realm of possible experience consistently, and it becomes the realm of our own conception of Being. But if one means only the sort of pure experience, the bare immediacy, to which the mystic referred, that sort of experience, as we found, is again explicitly nothing at all.

But if this empirical realm in question is the genuine realm of experience to which our ideas refer when, talking of experience with rational definiteness, we mean to see clearly, to observe closely, to know richly, and to live wisely, this is indeed an empirical world, and it is real. But it is real in the sense of our Fourth Conception. It is a life expressing in fulness what every transient moment of human consciousness fragmentarily embodies, and ideally seeks.

And as to finality, what constitution shall that realm of actual experience possess at all unless this constitution, in its wholeness, is indeed final, and final precisely in the sense of our Fourth Conception? For finality means, for us, the individual constitution of the realm of fact, interpreted in the only possible consistent way. You say, “Experience is.” If you are an empiricist you also say, “All that is, is, in at least one aspect, experienced fact.” Now, so far, all that is precisely