seeks to enlarge its realm. And in doing so one appeals
to what is called the external experience; and hereupon
one makes those particular judgments which are the
typical expression of our human sort of external experience.
But this is experience so far as it has not yet fused
with the internal meanings; but so far as, nevertheless,
through selection and through patient effort, it can
gradually be brought to the point where it decides
ideal issues. As other than the ideas, this experience
is said to be the evidence and the expression of the
external objects themselves. Yet these objects, for the
awakened reason, are no longer “things in themselves.”
Their contrast with the world of “mere ideas” is, indeed,
here insisted upon; but we have plainly, so far, no final
account of what the contrast is.
Ill
Yet there remains one further aspect of this whole situation of our judging thought, — an aspect upon which sufficient stress has not been laid. We have said, as against this Third Conception of Being, that at best it leaves Reality too much a bare abstract universal, and does not assert the individuality of Being. We have still to express this objection in a more formal way. As we have seen, all our universal and particular judgments leave Reality, in a measure, indeterminate. Can we tolerate this view of Reality as final?
Ideas, as such, take, we have said, the abstractly universal form. External experience, as such, in this realm where we find it sundered from the internal meanings, confirms or refutes ideas in particular cases. But do
