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tent of experience. Thus the reality of the phenomenal world and of our experience may be established; and not alone this, but it is also shown that the world of reality has an inner nature which can be conceived of after the analogies of experience. It does not necessarily follow, however, that reality must be thought of as coextensive with finite experience, for that would lead to the denial of much which, on other grounds, we shall find we are con- strained to assert as real. 1
Having fixed the point of departure and aim of metaphysical thought, any such investigation must next determine the point of view from which it proceeds, and its method, which is insepara- bly connected with it. eMtaphysics arises out of a fundamental demand on the part of the subject for explanation deeper than that given by science, and is found to culminate in making its central principle one other than that of science. The individual may look at his world as entirely external to himself, and so he sees a plurality of events ; but he cannot get farther than generali- x.ation and causal reference. The other and more direct mode of approach is through appreciation. By appreciation I mean a sympathetic identification of the subject or individual with the world in which the individual sees himself as an agent realizing his world in an experience which is individual for himself. He thinks himself as part of the stream of the world-process, and so looks at the rest of this stream as like himself in that it can be realized by him just as he realizes his own experience; or, in other words, he is at fellowship with the world, so that the dis- tinction between subject and object is no longer an absolute one. In science this distinction is fundamental. This appreciative experience might be said to be somewhat analogous to the indi- vidual's sense of his own individuality in that he feels that he is himself, and that there is something about that experience which he cannot communicate to others by putting it into terms, but which experience is intensely real to him, and to him and for him only. It involves a feeling of unity, or rather of correlation of purpose, in himself and the world. As far as the place of appre- ciation in the interpretation of the objective world is concerned,
1 ORMOND, Foundations of Knowledge, Part I, chap. 2.
