Experience, taken as external and particular, can never prove any absolute negation.
On the other hand, but for the very same reason, our experience, when taken as in contrast to our internal meanings, can never, in any finite time, completely confirm or demonstrate any universal judgment, such as, upon the basis of our internal meanings, we may have asserted. Some A is B. That is all that your experience, when viewed as other than your ideas, and as that to which you appeal for the sake of defining your external object, can ever by itself reveal. Herein lies the well-known limitation of the merely “inductive” processes of science. That we all believe universal propositions about yonder external world of valid objects, is due to the fact that we are none of us mere empiricists, even in this modified sense. All of us view some of our ideas as predetermining the nature of things, so that we conceive the reality as the fulfilment of distinctly internal meanings, — with what right we have yet to see.
All of these considerations arise in a realm where internal and external meanings, without ever being viewed as abstractly independent of one another, are still taken as actually and rightly sundered. And this, as we have now seen, is the case throughout the world of our Third Conception. All who use this conception, that is, all who once learn rationally to modify their Realism, while still regarding the antithesis of internal and of external as finally valid, employ the two main types of judgment which we have now examined. When the mathematicians use the existential judgments, of which we before have spoken, they, too, employ the particular judgments
