bject of experience; which goes its
way, in some respects, independently of these functions, and which
frustrates our hopes and intentions. Ignorance which is fatal;
disappointment; the need of adjusting means and ends to the course of
nature, would seem to be facts sufficiently characterizing empirical
situations as to render the existence of an external world indubitable.

That the description of experience was arrived at by forcing actual
empirical facts into conformity with dialectic developments from a
concept of a knower outside of the real world of nature is testified to
by the historic alliance of empiricism and idealism.[4] According to the
most logically consistent editions of orthodox empiricism, all that can
be experienced is the fleeting, the momentary, mental state. That alone
is absolutely and indubitably present; therefore, it alone is
cognitively certain. It alone is _knowledge_. The existence of the past
(and of the future), of a decently stable world and of other
selves--indeed, of one's own self--falls outside this datum of
experience. These can be arrived at only by inference which is
"ejective"--a name given to an alleged type of inference that jumps from
experience, as from a springboard, to something beyond experience.

I should not anticipate difficulty in showing that this doctrine is,
dialectically, a mass of inconsistencies. Avowedly it is a doctrine of
desperation, and as such it is cited here to show the desperate straits
to which ignoring empirical facts has reduced a doctrine of experience.
More positively instructive are the objective idealisms which have been
the offspring of the marriage between the "reason" of historic
rationalism and the alleged immediate psychical stuff of historic
empiricism. These idealisms have recognized the genuineness of
connexions and the impotency of "feeling." They have then identified
connexions with logical or rational connexions, and thus treated "the
real World" as a synthesis of sentient consciousness by means of a
rational self-consciousness introducing objectivity: stability and
universality of reference.

Here again, for present purposes, criticism is unnecessary. It suffices
to point out that the value of this theory is bound up with the
genuineness of the problem of which it purports to be a solution. If the
basic concept is a fiction, there is no call for the solution. The more
important point is to perceive how far the "thought" which figures