Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/37

12 to the case of human knowledge? Whose experience is ill question when we speak of truth?

By any man’s private experience, taken in the narrowest sense of the words, we mean what a man now has present to his consciousness. As I speak, I am conscious that these words are now uttered. This is present experience. You have a corresponding present experience as you listen. One’s whole present consciousness of his meaning, i.e. of what we before called the Internal Meaning of his ideas, is, in a similarly limited sense, empirical. But the term experience, as customarily employed when our human science is said to be founded upon experience, is used in a much broader sense. The term, as thus applied, refers to a wide range of facts which are said to have been experienced by various men at various times. But, as we had occasion to point out in the Eighth Lecture of our former series, it cannot be asserted that any human experience (taking that word in the narrowest sense) ever makes present to any man the fact that various men besides himself have their various experiences present to them. The broader conception of what is called “human experience” is a conception that thus obviously transcends every particular present human experience. The very existence of the body of facts called “man’s experience” has never been verified by any man.

Now this perfectly simple observation gets a serious importance so soon as we consider its bearing upon the question: What shall constitute, for an empirical theory of knowledge, the test of an “accredited fact”? When and how is any fact known to be a “fact of human experience”?