Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/60

not here.” Whoever, on the other hand, not only suffers, but also asserts: “These and these are the objective facts: my disease is this or this — my enemy has won against me thus or thus — cruel Nature, indifferent to my will, has such and such a constitution” — any such more rational sufferer lays himself open to the question, “How do you know these ideas of yours about those foreign facts to be true?” If the answer is, “Such is the verdict of human experience in general,” — then we already know that this very conception involves what we called relatively metempirical elements. No man of us has ever experienced what the general verdict of human experience really is. But if one answers, “This is what I myself now experience,” — then we reply “But you do not now experience the constitution of those external facts which you yourself characterize as foreign to you. You now only experience that you are not now succeeding.” But if the sufferer goes on to say, “It would be, in view of my experience, simple folly, mere unreasonableness, to admit the doubt that the foreign facts really are such and such” — then his position, as far as his comprehension of the facts enables him to go, is at once substantially identical with ours. He recognizes that he reasonably ought to view certain facts as in particular ways external to the internal meanings of his own ideas. But a world where that is real which now ought to be regarded as real, is a world where explicitly at least a certain aspect of one’s Internal Meaning is already recognized as expressed by the facts. For the Ought, as such, is never merely foreign to my own will. To recognize the whole fact-world as the final embodi-