200 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 



experience and reason respectively hold sway are 

 thus explained. Experience has to do with pro 

 duction, which, in turn, is relative to decay. It 

 deals with generation, becoming, not with finality, 

 being. Hence it is infected with the trait of rela 

 tive non-being, of mere imitativeness ; hence its 

 multiplicity, its logical inadequacy, its relativity 

 to a standard and end beyond itself. Reason, per 

 contra, has to do with meaning, with significance 

 (ideas, forms), that is eternal and ultimate. Since 

 the meaning of anything is the worth, the good, 

 the end of that thing, experience presents us with 

 partial and tentative efforts to achieve the em 

 bodiment of purpose, under conditions that doom 

 the attempt to inconclusiveness. It has, how 

 ever, its meed of reality in the degree in which 

 its results participate in meaning, the good, 

 reason. 



From this classic period, then, comes the an 

 tithesis of experience as the historically achieved 

 embodiments of meaning, partial, multiple, inse 

 cure, to reason as the source, author, and con 

 tainer of meanmg, permanent, assured, unified. 

 Idealism means ideality, experience means brute 

 and broken facts. That things exist because of 

 and for the sake of meaning, and that experience 

 gives us meaning in a servile, interrupted, and 

 inherently deficient way such is the standpoint. 

 Experience gives us meaning in process of be- 



