THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 235 



other. And if the reader rebels at the iteration of 

 such obvious tautology, I can only reiterate that 

 the realization of the meaning of this tautology is 

 the key to the whole question of the objectivity of 



, experience, as that stands to the empiricist. The 

 lines of that experience are divergent ; not merely 

 seem so. The question of truth is not as to 

 whether Being or Non-Being, Reality or mere 



- Appearance, is experienced, but as to the worth of 

 a certain concretely experienced thing. The only 

 way of passing upon this question is by sticking 

 in the most uncompromising fashion to that ex 

 perience as real. That experience is that two 

 lines with certain cross-hatchings are apprehended 

 as convergent ; only by taking that experience as 

 real and as fully real, is there any basis for, or 

 way of going to, an experienced knowledge that 

 the lines are parallel. It is in the concrete thing 

 as experienced that all the grounds and clues to 

 its own intellectual or logical rectification are con 

 tained. It is because this thing, afterwards ad 

 judged false, is a concrete that, that it develops 

 into a corrected experience (that is, experience of 

 a corrected thing we reform things just as we 

 reform ourselves or a bad boy) whose full content 

 is not a whit more real, but which is true or truer. 1 



1 Perhaps the point would be clearer if expressed in this 

 way: Except as subsequent estimates of worth are intro 

 duced, &quot; real &quot; means only existent. The eulogistic connota- 



