Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/39

14 Does any man experience the fact that there exists'' any collective whole to be called the totality of human experience? Does any man experience the fact that any other man has experience? Surely, the astronomer does not observe in his world of presentations the fact that the physician observes the phenomena of disease, or that the carpenter observes the making of houses. But if the carpenter, the physician, and the astronomer believe, as they do, each one, that the others have experience of facts, then each believes in an existence, viz. in the existence of the totality formed of their three orders of experience, although this totality is “inaccessible” to the personal experience of any of them. And still more, when the astronomer or the physician or the carpenter appeals, as a man of science or of common sense, to the “general experience of mankind,” or to the experience of any selected company of experts, as the guarantee of the truth of any of his beliefs, each of them appeals to a body of fact which, as such a body of fact, has never been present to the experience of any man at any time.

It is plain, then, that if we say: “That only is to constitute ‘accredited fact’ which some individual man has verified for himself through its presence in his experience,” our doctrine can be interpreted in either one of two ways. The first and in fact the usual way of interpreting the thesis is as follows: “There does exist the body of accredited facts, ɑ, b, c, etc., such that any fact belonging to this body of facts as, — for instance, — ɑ has been verified by the experience of some man, let us say by A, while some other man, as B, may