Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/389

370 dividual, this teleological constitution of the realm of Being, which we have asserted as our Fourth Conception. What is it that you doubt? And what alternative would be true if your doubt were well founded? Hesitate not to give your doubt all possible precision. Philosophy lives upon the comprehension of the meaning of its own doubts.

Let one then say, by way of a mere trial at scepticism. “Beyond a given circle of experience, supposed to be at present known to you and to me, or to me alone, there may be Nothing at all. Let us then suppose, for argument’s sake, that there is nothing at all beyond what you or I may just now feel to be present, as our empirical facts, as our passing conscious ideas, desires, hopes, as our so-called memories, and as the problems of the instant. Let that be the realm of Being. Let there be supposed to be naught in the universe but just this. Now this little realm of given fact has no consciously experienced finality about it, no wholeness, no satisfying constitution, no absoluteness. Yet this little realm of passing consciousness somehow exists. How then shall this Fourth Conception of Being refute the purely sceptical hypothesis thus made? And unless such a sceptical hypothesis is refuted, how can any assertions which transcend the instantaneous limits of our human form of consciousness be made in any wise certain?”

So far the doubter’s hypothesis. I reply: This doubt, once stated as a possible account of a realm of Being, has all the responsibilities of any ontology. It hypothetically defines as real, a supposed, or given, finite circle of empirical facts, called this instant’s contents. It sup-