xv PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 281 



even lead us to regard a future life as a priori probable 

 enough, and needing only verification a posteriori. 



Hence, speaking for myself and in so personal a 

 matter it is best to speak for oneself if one wants to speak 

 to the point I cannot at all appreciate the enormous 

 antecedent difficulty which so many philosophers profess 

 to feel about the conception of a future life. Even its 

 most difficult implications, like, e.g., the transition from 

 one world to another, seem to become quite easy, if we 

 start from the proper philosophic basis. Let us, for 

 instance, assume as I think we must do in any case 

 the philosophic position of an idealistic experientialism. 

 I use this clumsy phrase to designate the view that the 

 world is primarily my experience, plus (secondarily) the 

 supplementings of that experience which its nature renders 

 it necessary to assume, such as, e.g., other persons and a 

 real material world. In that case the world, in which 

 we suppose ourselves to be, is, and always remains, relative 

 to the experience which we seek to interpret by it, and 

 if that experience were to change, so necessarily would 

 our real world. Its reality was guaranteed to it, so 

 long as it did its work and explained our experience ; it 

 is abrogated so soon as it ceases to do so. 1 Hence we 

 may conceive ourselves as passing through any number 

 of worlds, separated from each other by (partial) dis 

 continuities in our experience, each of which would be 

 perfectly real while it lasted, and yet would have to be 

 declared unreal from a higher and clearer point of view. 



Nor would this conception remain an empty form, 

 which we could not find anything in our experience to 

 illustrate. I venture to affirm that we are all of us per 

 fectly familiar with what it feels like to pass from one 

 world into another. When we fall asleep and dream, we 

 pass jinto a new world, with space, time, persons, and 

 laws (uniformities) like our own. But though these 

 fundamental features persist in principle, they are not the 

 same space, etc., 2 and have no very obvious connexion 

 with the corresponding characteristics of our waking life. 

 1 Cp. p 193. 2 Cp. p. 32. 



