pends, on the contrary, upon recognising fact as supreme, and merely asking: What constitution of fact in its wholeness has to be asserted if you are to avoid contradictions?
The basis of our whole theory is the bare brute fact of experience which you have always with you, namely, the fact: Something is real. Our question is: What is this reality? or, again, What is the ultimately real? As we saw in our earlier section, scepticism tries to reply: “The contents of this experience, as present contents, are alone real.” We found this reply self-contradictory. Why? Because the question, “What is here real?” inevitably involves ideas that transcend the present data. Hereupon our half-idealist asserted: “Real beyond the present are possibilities of experience.” But hereupon the half-idealist fell prey to the realist, who pointed out that, just in so far as the possible experiences transcended the data, they were ipso facto his transcendent “things in themselves,” wholly beyond experience. The realist, however, could himself give no consistent account of these facts as “things in themselves,” because his conception of transcendence was itself a mere abstraction. The only way of consistently defining the situation proved to be the assertion: “The ultimate reality is here, as everywhere, the whole of experience, viewed as Whole.”
This Whole, as such, now proves to have a definable constitution. For it is, first, that to which every finite thought refers in so far as, rightly or wrongly, in truth or in error, it raises any question as to the reality implied in any experience, however fragmen-
