forced, as has been seen in the foregoing, to appeal to “possible experience.” He asserts that beyond the confines of what anybody does experience there are an indefinite number of “possibilities of experience.” Now these possibilities of experience are either genuine facts when and while they are not experienced, or else they are mere illusions, just in so far as they are called mere possibilities, and are not the contents of anybody’s actual experience. To admit the latter of these alternatives would be to deprive the opponent of Realism of all that makes his doctrine popularly plausible, or even rational. For it is admitted by the opponent of Realism, that our concrete experience implies much which does not now get presented to it. And the supposed “possibilities of experience” are intended to supply the place of what is thus implied. If they are illusions, then this place is not supplied. On the other hand, the first of the alternatives mentioned admits that the possibilities of experience have some sort of being when nobody experiences them. And such being, outside of any concrete experience, is precisely what the realistic hypothesis demands. In vain, so the realist now urges, does the opponent endeavour by the phrase “possible experience” to cloak the fact that a possibility of experience, when it is real but unexperienced, as much exists wholly beyond the range of experience as if it were frankly reduced to a “thing in itself,” of the sort that the realist himself defines.
It will be unnecessary here to analyse at any length the cogency of this argument. In my original paper,
