Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/204

“possible experience” that, if attained, would throw light upon the question as to what contents are actual beyond the now presented contents. Still more certainly can we say that either a true or a false answer to our questions, if now given, would be true or false by virtue of its agreement with contents that, if presented, would confirm or refute the supposed answer. Just so as regards the question concerning the present fulfilment of any other idea, such as the idea of the completeness of the world of experience, or the idea of a whole world of facts. All such questions, whether just now a definite answer for any one of them is true or false, or whether any one of them is a meaningless question, imply beyond our own experience a present “possibility of experience,” such as even now warrants the truth of some assertion in reply to each question. It is in this sense that our experience implies a beyond, and a beyond that, in the first place, appears as a world of definite “possible experience,” having a determinate, and in the end inevitably a true, total constitution. This total constitution it is impossible, however, to leave finally in the shape just given to it, without recognising, first, that our realist is right in demanding that all possibility shall have its ground in something beyond the mere feeling or assertion of the possibility itself; and, secondly, that the idealist is right in maintaining that nothing viewed as being beyond experience, in its wholeness, can be rationally asserted as a reality. The inevitable result is that the total constitution of the world of fact must be presented to a concrete whole of actual experience, of