most sceptical empiricists. While then philosophy is unable to predict a priori the special contents of human experience, it is forced to insist that by the term “human experience” we always mean more than the facts that are verified by individual men.
It remains perfectly true, of course, that the empiristic thesis which has just been examined is not without its deep significance, and that what empiricism has intended to emphasize is, when its statement has been properly modified, a truth, and one of the first importance. In the former series of lectures,[1] we had occasion, when discussing the Third Conception of Being, to point out the sense in which, even in pure mathematics, “experience is the only guide to concrete results.” As we there indicated, all our transcending of experience is in a perfectly definite sense based upon our experience. When we reason about the unseen, as, for instance, about the “infinite assemblages” of recent mathematical theory, or about our idealistic Absolute, still, in all our investigations, “actual experience guides,” “presented facts sustain” us, just as, in the passage cited, we set forth. Yet there is no inconsistency between observing this truth, and still rejecting the thesis of the empiricist in the form in which it has often been stated. Our whole argument in our transition to the Fourth Conception of Being illustrated how it is of the very nature of our human experience of our Internal Meaning to point beyond what is presented, for the sake of defining the very fulfilment which our presented meanings demand, and without which they have neither truth nor Being. It is true that every exact and demonstrative
