or experience which another man has in mind when he refers to the Battle of Marathon. Thus many think of the same battle, but the contents of experience in many minds are not the same, and need not even be very similar. In vain,” so our realist may add, “does an idealist attempt, in such cases, to take refuge afresh in scepticism, and merely to doubt whether we all are really referring to the same Battle of Marathon at all. For, as said, scepticism of this sort must find in the end its limit. One is unable to reason through the whole of even one sentence — one is unable to state even the most extreme of scepticism — with any coherence, without assuming that many successive thoughts can refer to the same object. And one is unable to carry out the least act of social intercourse without assuming that A and B, the persons concerned, see, touch, pass from one to another, or otherwise deal with, the same object. Experience, as such, is indeed a world of Heraclitean flux. But the conditions which make many moments of experience, many thoughts, or many people, refer to the same content or moment of experience, or to the same fact in any sense, are not themselves, as conditions of the sameness of reference, contents of anybody’s experience, or part of the flow of its ceaseless stream. These conditions, then, presupposed in all rationality, are ipso facto transcendent. In brief, then: The sameness of the objects of experience, in so far as these objects can be thought of at various times, can be referred to by various subjects, can be objects for many points of view, demands that at least the relations whereby this same reference is secured, if not the facts themselves
