apart from some actual experience. To say: So and so is possible, is to say: There is, somewhere in experience, an actuality some aspect of which can be defined in terms of this possibility, A possibility is a truth expressed in terms of a proposition beginning with if, or a hypothetical proposition, — an is expressed in terms of an if. But every hypothetical proposition involves a categorical proposition. Every if implies an is. For you cannot define a truth as concretely true unless you define it as really present to some experience. Thus, for instance, I can easily define my actual experience by expressing some aspect of it in the form of a supposition, even if the supposition be one contrary to fact, but I cannot believe in the truth of such a supposition without believing in some concrete and experienced fact. The suitor asks for the daughter. The father replies: “I will give thee my daughter if thou canst touch heaven.” Here the father expresses his actually experienced intention in the form of a hypothetical proposition each member of which he believes to be false. The suitor cannot touch heaven, and is not to get the gift of the daughter. Yet the hypothetical proposition is to be true. Why? Because it expresses in terms of an if what the father experiences in terms of an is, namely, the obdurate inner will of the forbidding parent himself. Just so with any if proposition. Its members, antecedent and consequent, may be false. But it is true only in case there corresponds to its fashion of assertion some real experience.
And now, to apply this thought to our central problem: You and I, whenever we talk of reality as
