Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/66

you therefore construct conceptions which start, indeed, in your fragmentary experience, but which transcend it infinitely, and which so do inevitably run into danger of becoming mere shadows — pure Platonic ideas. But you don’t mean your conceptions to remain thus shadowy. By the devices of hypothesis, prediction, and verification, you seek to link anew the concept and the presentation, the ideal order and the stubborn chaos, the conceived truth and the immediate datum, the contents of the organised experience and the fragments of your momentary flight of sensations. In so far as you succeed in this effort, you say that you have science. In so far as you are always, in presented experience, limited to your chaos, you admit that your sensations are of subjective moment and often delude you. But in so far as your conceptions of the contents of the ideal organised experience get verified, you say that you acquire the aforesaid indirect knowledge of the contents of the ideal and organised experience. We men know all things through contrasts. It is the contrast of your supposed indirect knowledge of the contents of the ideal organised experience with your direct and actual, but fragmentary, passing experience, that enables you to confess your ignorance. Were you merely ignorant, you could not know the fact. Because you are indirectly assured of the truth of an insight that you cannot directly share, you accuse your direct experience of illusory fragmentariness. But in so doing you contrast the contents of your individual experience, not with any mere reality apart from any possible experience, but