perience, and in the objects of our thoughts about possible experience at various times, the whole theory about possibilities of experience would be meaningless. Yet nowhere in our flowing experience does the sameness, which the half-idealist also presupposes, ever get adequately and finally presented. Nor could it be presented to any temporal experience similar to our own. Thus afresh may the realist maintain that the sameness of our objects logically involves their transcendence.
This argument from the sameness of the objects of various experiences and thoughts — a sameness required indeed by all rationality — is probably the strongest, and, properly viewed, the most enlightening, of realistic arguments. It is not, like the earliest arguments mentioned in the foregoing discussion, a mere appeal to common-sense prejudices. It is an appeal to something that the utmost scepticism, if articulate, not only admits, but asserts; namely, that various judgments and moments of experience can mean the same objects. Without this assertion, no criticism of a thesis, no sceptical rejection of a theory, no doubt about the power of our thought to know truth, can be seriously stated or definitely maintained. If one wants the ultimate truth regarding what motive it is that forces us to transcend our fragmentary experience, in idea if not in fact, and to seek in the beyond for something missing in the stream of consciousness, nowhere can one better satisfy one’s curiosity than in taking account of this aspect of experience and of this motive in favour of transcendence. On the other hand, no one of the realistic
