so far as you tell what you mean. Whatever you assert as existent beyond our experience, without telling what you mean by the assertion, that, by hypothesis, you have not really and rationally asserted. For a meaningless assertion is no assertion at all. You want to say that beyond our experience there is something transcendent, whose nature is never experienced, whose contents always remain outside of the world of experience. But you can never tell what you mean by this beyond, precisely in so far as it remains a beyond. Telling what you mean is transforming your beyond into something within the world of experience. Therefore I reject your beyond altogether. Experience is all. Yet I admit that much experience remains to us indeed only a ‘possibility.’” “Yes,” retorts the realist, “but in your last word you have admitted the very essence of my whole contention. For within the range of what individuals do experience you admit that we cannot remain. You admit the possibilities of experience as somehow genuine. You cannot do without them. Yet, as soon as you admit them, you admit an element transcending concrete experience. You admit something whose presence you cannot escape, but whose nature you find it as hard to define as I find it hard to tell precisely what I mean by that transcendent something which my theory frankly admits, and glories in, but which your theory grudgingly recognises, even in trying to conceal the fact of the recognition. Your possibilities are either mere illusions, or else facts. If facts are not experienced, they are beyond experience. And such beyond is all that I
