Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/49

24 hoping to learn to distinguish prejudice from rational insight, and well-grounded assurance from uncertainty. But while we live in presentations, and think in terms of them, we all constantly use them, whether rationally or irrationally, only to transcend them. What is given is indeed our guide; but what is not now given, namely, the whole true Being of things, is our goal.

In still another respect, as we also saw in our former course, the assertion of empiricism conveys a deep truth in an inadequate expression. The term “metempirical,” which we have just used, is only a relative term. We have here employed it with express reference to the transcending of the narrow limits of human experience. But of course such transcending, so far as we get our indirectly demonstrable right to the assertion that facts lie beyond these narrow limits, is not a transcending of all experience. What lies beyond our presentations is still, in so far as it has true Being, presentation. For the world of fact exists in so far as it is presented in unity to the Absolute Experience. That we have asserted throughout. In so far as a consistent empiricism is opposed to Realism, our own argument has fully accepted the theses involved in such opposition. Every question about Being is also a question about the organization of experience, that is, about the organization of the true, the final experience, of which our own is always a fragment.

The characteristic limitation of human experience is, then, that it grasps, within the narrow limits of this