II
THE POSSIBILITIES OF EXPERIENCE
The easiest way to begin a comprehensible answer to this question is, as I must forthwith insist, the way that I indicated in my first paper — the way upon which idealists have so often insisted. When any experience refers beyond itself, what it at the very least may refer to, what it may aim to grasp and to know, what it may regard as valid independently of its own contents, may well be, and in our lives often explicitly is, other possible experience not here presented. One has an experience of a blue object that seems to be “yonder on the horizon.” One’s experience herewith undertakes to refer to a reality that exists independently of just this experience. But the reality in question may be explicitly regarded, not as any Ding an sich, but solely as other, “really possible,” experience. “If I approach,” one may mean, “if I move towards yonder mountain, I shall cease to experience a mere patch of blue on the horizon. I shall erelong see bold outlines, the forms of crags, of valleys, of forests. In the end, if I approach near enough, I shall experience what I shall call the touch of the solid objects yonder.” Now in saying this I at least may abstract from all reference to the “transcendent” objects of the realist. I may be meaning simply, that, whereas I now experience such or such visual contents, it is permanently possible that I should experience other contents, visual and tactile, if I performed certain acts. These permanent possibilities
