Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/48

Rh proposition which does transcend the presented and verified data of our experience is capable, for us men, only of an indirect demonstration, such as we in fact gave for our conception of the Absolute in the Eighth Lecture of the foregoing course, and such as we have just given for our assertion that every human experience is inseparably bound up with elements which remain, for us men, metempirical. Yet an indirect demonstration involves precisely an appeal to present experience (namely to the present experience of an incongruity in the form in which given ideas now present themselves to us), for our warrant and guide in an undertaking whereby we transcend present experience. In fact, then, our presented experience is indeed our only guide; but it always guides us by pointing beyond itself ''to that without which it becomes self-contradictory. We'' know of no metempirical truth except by means of ''presentations. But our presentations, in our present form of'' consciousness, get their whole sense from their reference to what, ''for us, remains metempirical truth. No fact gets'' ''“accredited” unless our experience gives it credit. But experience,'' when rationally interpreted, in the light of our indirect demonstrations, never gives credit to any facts except to those which, in some aspect, transcend our presentations.

The most manifest lesson of memory, of our social consciousness, and of our reasonings about mathematical and physical truth, is that, for us men, the office of what is given to us, as presented fact, is to point beyond itself to what is not presented. Common sense generally makes this transition too easily, on grounds of mere habit, of prejudice, or of traditional faith. Philosophy has to criticise the grounds of the transition, and does so,