Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/41

16 the existence of an indefinitely vast range of fact that it also declares to be not “accredited fact.” To become consistent our thesis would have to be amended thus: “No fact is ‘accredited’ unless it belongs to the system above defined, except, to be sure, the fact that this system, together with its various observers, exists. That fact, indeed, is present to no human observer’s experience. And yet, although it thus transcends every man’s observation and verification, it is an ‘accredited’ fact.” But the thesis, as thus amended, is no longer even a relatively pure empiricism. It is a synthesis of an appeal to human experience with an admission of principles that, whatever they are, or however they are grounded, transcend every man's experience. This is a simple, but a curiously neglected, consideration.

The second form in which the thesis may be held is this: “No fact is ‘accredited fact’ except in so far as it is verified by the present momentary experience of myself, here and now, to whom it thus becomes accredited fact.” So stated, the thesis is indeed remote enough from common sense, since it excludes me from recognizing, not only your experience, but my own experiences of an hour since, or of yesterday, or of last year, as “accredited fact,” and so excludes me from regarding as “accredited fact” either the observations of experts, or the experience of mankind in general, or the results of my own observations during the course of my brief life, as far as that life lies beyond the limits (whatever they are) of what I call the present. We are not concerned with examining here all of the metaphysical implications of this form of the thesis now in question. The result