Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/191

166 fellow-men. The one belief cannot be understood apart from the other. Whatever the deeper reality behind Nature may turn out to be, — our Nature, the realm of matter and of laws with which our science and our popular opinions have to do, is a realm which we conceive as known or as knowable to various men, in precisely the same general sense in which we regard it as known or as knowable to our private selves. Take away the social factor in our present view of Nature, and you would alter the most essential of the characters possessed, for us, by that physical realm in which we all believe.

How significant this aspect of our belief in Nature is, you may see if you will look a little more closely at the facts. There is much, indeed, in the realm of Reality in general, apart from Nature, which a man need not view as accessible to all men, in so far as they are men. As a matter of religious faith, one might well believe, for instance, that upon a given occasion God had revealed his will to a single prophet, or other inspired person, and that this revelation not only remained, but had to remain, by God's will, a secret quite inaccessible to all other men. In the reality of the revelation in question one might nevertheless believe, simply because, by hypothesis, God would be conceived, by a believer in such a revelation, as a real person, and the prophet as also a real person. And whatever occurs to one person, as a fact of his inner life, and whatever passes between two persons, may remain a secret inaccessible to all other persons, in so far as these persons are finite individuals. Or again, I now believe in your mind as a reality, external to mine; yet I also view your mental life as, in its own direct presence