en men who have not granted any
such compelling implications to self-consciousness. They have
maintained that "finites" are forever "finites," and that there are no
bridges that carry us from our finite "nows" and "heres" to an infinite
Reality. The infinite Reality, they all admit, is conceivable; it is
"an idea" to which any mind can rise by normal processes of thought,
"but," so they say, "an _idea_ of an infinite Reality, an Infinite
merely conceived in the mind, is different, by the whole width of the
sky, from an actual objective infinite Reality that is _there_, and
that contains inherently all that our hearts seek in God."

It is quite true, of course, that the presence of "an idea" in our mind
does not of itself prove the existence of a corresponding objective
reality _out there_ in a world independent of our mind. There is most
assuredly no way of bridging "the chasm" between mind and an objective
world beyond and outside of mind, when once the "chasm" is assumed.
But the fundamental error lies in the assumption of any such "chasm."
The "chasm" which yawns between the inner and outer world is of our own
making. Whenever we know anything, wherever there is knowledge at all,
there is a synthetic indivisible whole of experience in which a subject
knows an object. Subject and object cannot be really sundered without
putting an instant end to knowledge--leaving "a bare grin without a
face!" The only way we know anything is that we know we know it in
experience. We do not ever succeed in proving that objects exist _out
there_ in the world beyond us exactly correspondent to these ideas in
our minds. That is a feat of mental gymnastics quite parallel to that
of "finding" {xxxiv} the self with which we do the seeking. The
crucial problem of knowledge is not to discover a bridge to leap the
chasm between the mind within and the world beyond. It is rather the
problem of finding a basis of verifying and testing what we know, and
of making knowledge a consistent rational whole.

The method of testing and verifying any fact of truth which we have on
our hands, is always to organize it and link it into a larger whole of
knowledge which we ourselves, or the wider group of persons in which we
are organic members, have verified, and to see that it fits in
consistently into this larger whole, and in this rational process we
always assume, and are bound to assume, some sort of Reality that
transcends the fleeting and t