I expressly pointed out that the “possibilities of experience,” in so far as they remained bare possibilities, are as unintelligible as the realist’s “things in themselves.” Idealism cannot pause half-way without falling a helpless prey to the counter-dialectics of the realists. Our Idealism, as we first stated it, both in the original paper and in the earlier portion of the present review, is just such a half-way Idealism. In presence of the realistic counter-arguments, it is helpless to defend its positive assertion. It is only able continually to reassert its own kind of objection to the positive thesis of the realist. But it is indeed fair to say, that the objection of the half-idealist to the positive realistic thesis in question is precisely as cogent as the realistic rejoinder. Each theory, as a fact, is, so far, helpless to defend its positive assertions against an opponent’s criticism. The realist asserts: “Beyond all our experience, there is something wholly unlike experience, the ‘thing in itself.’” To this thesis our half-idealist always rejoins: “What do you mean by your ‘thing in itself,’ — by the reality, and by the nature, that you ascribe to it? And in what relation do you mean it to stand to experience? As soon as you tell, you interpret your supposed reality wholly in terms of experience. You never define that transcendent beyond, of which you speak. You say, only: ‘If we looked further into the nature of what our present experience implies, we should get other experiences in addition to those that we now have.’ Into such possibilities of experience your ‘thing in itself,’ as well as all its relations, causal and other, to our present experience, is transformed, in
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SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY BY PROFESSOR ROYCE
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