Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/392

Rh to be itself a fact, but a fact whose reality nobody experiences. But what kind of Being has this fact? It is, by hypothesis, the object to which the sceptical assertion relates. As such object, other than the sceptic’s assertion, but really meant by him as a truth, it is in the position that we have now exhaustively discussed. It cannot be a fact whose Being is wholly independent of the sceptic’s own assertion, nor yet a being of the mystical type, nor a merely universal valid truth, of the type of our Third Conception of Being. For all these types of Being have been found logically wanting. Nor can it be in any sense an object merely agreeing with our sceptic’s assertion, and externally correspondent thereto. For external agreement with an idea that asserts Being, when such agreement is taken alone, constitutes neither the Being of any object, nor the truth of any idea. That A is the only existent experience must, therefore, be a fact which, as an individual fact, fulfils the will embodied in the sceptic’s hypothesis, both in so far as this will refers to that fact, and in so far as the sceptic himself inevitably, even in still supposing the non-being of all but A, talks of Being in general and of the universe in its wholeness. The only possible result is that, in asserting that A is all experience, the sceptic’s hypothesis, if consistent with itself, asserts that A itself consciously contains, presents, and fulfils the whole meaning involved in the idea of Being; or in other words that A is not a mere passing thrill of human experience, but is an absolute experience, self-determined, self-contained, individual, whole, and therefore final.

The sceptic’s hypothesis, therefore, so soon as it is made