Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/393

374 explicit, wholly agrees with our own. Nothing can be but such a whole experience.

But our empirical objector may finally turn upon us with another version of his parable. “Who,” he may say, “could for a day attempt to hold your Fourth Conception of Being, and still face a single one of the most characteristic facts of human experience, a single practical failure, a single case where dear hopes have to be resigned, an hour of darkness and private despair, a public calamity, or even a sleepless night, — who I say could face such commonplace facts and not have the observation thrust, as it were, upon him by the seemingly irresistible powers of this world, — the well-known observation: ‘You reason in vain: these hard facts are against you.’ Your view is too simple for this our complex real world. What is, does not in any essential way fulfil ideas. What is real, is once more whatever experience shows to exist. And experience contains all sorts of non-fulfilments and irrationalities. Chaos or order, joy or defeat, tears of despair and shouts of victory, mysteries, storms, north winds, wars, the wreck of hearts, the might of evil, the meteors that wander in interplanetary darkness, the suns that waste their radiant energy in the chill depths of lifeless space, — these all are facts, — these are Beings. Why talk of Being? What Being in itself is, may well remain unknowable. But what is consistent with the existence of facts, you experience whenever you observe just such wretchedly irrational facts as