to a fevered patient to vary thus or thus; but the real temperature remains all the while nearly constant. Here the seeming is the content of the patient’s momentary experience. The real temperature is a fact that either is, or conceivably might be, present to a larger, a more organised and scientific and united experience, such as his physician may come nearer than himself to possessing. The sun seems to rise and set; but in reality the earth turns on its axis. Here the apparent movement of the sun is somewhat indirectly presented to a narrow sort of human experience. A wider experience, say an experience defined from an extra-terrestrial point of view, would have presented to it the earth’s rotation as immediately as we now can get the sunrise presented to us. To conceive any human belief as false — say, the belief of a lunatic, a fanatic, a philosopher, or a theologian — is to conceive this opinion as either possibly or actually corrected from some higher point of view, to which a larger whole of experience is considered as present.
Passing to the limit in this direction, we can accordingly say that by the absolute reality we can only mean either that which is present to an absolutely organised experience inclusive of all possible experience, or that which would be presented as the content of such an experience if there were one. If there concretely is such an absolute experience, then there concretely is such a reality present to it. If the absolute experience, however, remains to the end barely possible, then the concept of reality must be tainted by the same bare possibility. But the two
