Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/430

Rh that type of Being from the concrete present experience in terms of which you define it, or from the past experience, whose laws you expect to find repeated when you define physical possibilities. If you write down an equation, and prove its properties, or demonstrate that it has roots, you actually deal with presented symbols and diagrams, with calculations whose outcome you now observe; in brief, with data of experience here and now. If you somehow extend into infinity the valid meaning of these present experiences, your right to do this involves the unity of your present mathematical experience with the whole realm of reality to which you refer. And if you define a physical possibility, such as the possible freezing of a given body of water, or the possible observations of a coming eclipse, you presuppose that certain laws of past experience and of past Being will hold valid in the future; and by virtue of this relation only can you undertake to say of the possible physical experience, It is valid.

Validity then, if one rightly affirms it at all, is a type of Being absolutely bound up with the Being of present, of past, and of future experience. Its Being is even for common sense one with their Being.

Despite all the contrasts of even the world of common sense, we deal so far then with one conceived infinitely complex whole, whose Being is of one inclusive type, though differentiated into various types.

The kind of Being that we ascribe to the minds of our human fellows remains to be here very briefly considered. As a fact, and as we shall later see more in detail, when we come to the problems of the second half of the present