Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/391

372 our own Fourth Conception of Being would directly apply to it. And our doubter would then be no mere sceptic; for his positive account would be ours. But since, by hypothesis, A is a passing moment, a dissatisfied instant of finite human experience, the fact that it comprises all that is real is not itself present to the experience of A. And the non-being of all except A, the exclusion from Being of all not present in A, is supposed to be a fact, but a fact whose that, whose very existence as a real fact, must consequently be sought elsewhere than in the conscious experience present to A alone. This already contradicts the hypothesis here in question, as we first stated it. For the fact that A is all Being cannot itself be part of the experience of a consciously fragmentary, or dissatisfied A. Yet A was, by hypothesis, to contain all Being. Our sceptic, then, if you suppose him a mere partisan of experience as the only reality, has begun by contradicting himself.

But this is not all. This supposed fact, that A is all Being, or that Naught but A exists, may indeed next be made formally consistent with itself by an amendment. Let the hypothesis now run, as amended, thus: “A contains all experience, or all conscious fact, but besides this conscious fact there does exist the unconscious fact, the mere brute reality, unknown to anybody, and present to nobody’s experience, the mere fact that A is, not indeed all Being, but all Experience.” The sceptical hypothesis thus amended leads, however, at once, to precisely our foregoing alternatives as to the sense in which this supposed fact of the loneliness of A can be asserted as a real fact. That there is no experience in the universe except A, is now supposed