Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/42

Rh of such an analysis, if thoroughgoing, would involve, as we indicated in the passage just cited from the Eighth Lecture of our First Series, the same dialectic process by which we were led through the series of the concepts of Being from Realism to Idealism. For we should have to ask: What form of Being have the facts that are at present so verified by me as to constitute a realm, however apparently insignificant, of “accredited facts”? And the answer to the question would lead us to observe that these facts, in so far as they have true Being at all, are neither wholly independent, nor wholly immediate, nor merely valid, but are what they are by virtue of their place in a self-determined system of facts, whose totality is simply our idealistic Absolute.

Meanwhile, however, although it concerns us not here to go again over the ground of our whole metaphysic, it will be of service to us to recall so much thereof as to let us see that the thesis, in this second form, is, as it stands, quite as self-contradictory as it was in its first form, unless, indeed, it means to assert that at the present instant I can verify an infinity of facts.

A moment’s reflection serves to show me, for the first, that I do not clearly know what constitutes the whole, the totality of fact, that I can and do just now verify in my present experience. Nor can I clearly distinguish between what is now verifiable and what is not now verifiable. I may say that I verify the fact of my present speaking of these words, so that thus much, at least, is, in the sense of my thesis, “accredited fact.” But what is it to speak these words? What is it that I verify in observing my own speech? Nothing is harder than to