Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/185

160 ever about a collection of principles called fundamental or innate assurances. Nor yet can we here, appealing to our more thoughtful and scientifically organized experience, assert that even the success of science, by itself, sufficiently warrants us in attributing to matter a valid Being, which, just because it is independent of our caprices, must remain valid in a realm wholly beyond that of the minds of men. For we know, from our former criticisms of Critical Rationalism, that a merely valid Being, taken by itself, is not yet a real Being. And the philosophical inquiry into the reality that lies at the basis of our experience of Nature, is only begun when we point out that, for our experience, the laws of Nature are valid. For the question at once arises, in what form of life, in what expression of the Absolute, in what Being of our own fourth or idealistic type, are our valid laws of Nature founded?

It follows that for us, at this stage, when once we raise the question regarding the Reality of Nature, the most ordinary conventional answers will in no sense serve.

We must undertake the whole problem afresh. As we do so, we next meet an account of the foundations of our belief in the external and natural world which is so frequently defended, and so familiar, that we cannot here pass it over in silence. It involves looking deeper into the nature of our idea of Being, than those look who simply say that we directly perceive by our senses the external existence of natural objects. And while it indeed appeals to a certain axiom, namely, to the supposed axiom of causality, it is usually more critical in its statement than are most of the views that