Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/46

Rh deeper human mystery is there than the Ego? On the other hand, if I have completely solved the problem of self-consciousness, and if I am aware at this instant of the solution, so as to verify all that, as a fact, I am, then, for the same reason as the one before cited, I have present to myself an infinity of contents of consciousness. The maintainer of our thesis does not intend to assert that the Ego of this instant, of whom he speaks, does at present consciously verify this infinity of facts. It is clear to me just now that I do not do so. But the only alternative for the defender of our thesis is the assertion of a fact, viz. the Ego, — a fact whose Being is not wholly verified at present, although it is indirectly known as a fact, and as a fact possessed of this verified wealth of reality. And thus the thesis is indeed reduced to a self-contradiction. For the result is that there are “accredited facts,” implied in the very acceptance of the thesis, which are still not facts now verified by me.

It is quite impossible, then, to assert that there are no “accredited facts” in the world, as known to us men, except those which have been verified, or which are verified in the experience of some individual man, or in the several experiences of various men. Human experience is logically and inseparably bound up with elements which remain for us men, in our present form of consciousness, metempirical. The assertion that we know the world only in so far as individual human experience has verified the facts of the world cannot be consistently stated, and is never consistently applied, even by the most ardent and