ever, of seeking reality in some other world of ideal truth causes us to leap over the delusive and illogical but the very real experience of actual life. But except, perhaps, for the mystic in his moments of rapture, this seeking a beyond does not change the character of human experience that I have laid stress upon, so that as a philosopher a man may be anything you like, but as a man, living the life of a human being, he is bound to be a realist in his spontaneous organic attitudes. These, of course, are not philosophy, but they determine the character of experience, which is the basis of philosophy.
What I have been trying to bring forward is the fact of what has been called a natural view of the world, a natural Weltbegriff[1] as contrasted with a relatively artificial one resting on a foundation of dialectical subtlety. The latter we may believe and preach, but the former we live. The subtle and critical doctrine may be the true one, but it makes no difference to experience whether it is true or not.
I trust this will not appear far-fetched and trivial. To me, it appears at the other extreme of commonplace. I dwell upon it so much because of our habits, as students of philosophy, of neglecting experience which seems illusory from our favorite point of view.
There is then a natural view of the world, a natural attitude toward it, a natural illusion if you like, from which we may possibly be delivered by moments of profounder insight. But our experiences of philosophic grace are like many other experiences of grace; one comes at pretty regular intervals, perhaps, into the temple, but one continually relapses into sin. It is just about impossible to continually recognize in the outer world the garment of divinity. We have very probably our ‘philosophy of clothes,’ but it is pretty certainly a philosophy of Sunday clothes.
This natural view of the world which seems so appropriate to the organism in a biological way is that natural attitude which Avenarius has discussed in his essay ‘Der Menschliche Weltbegriff.’
A few sentences in that book are so striking that I venture to quote them. He has been speaking of the idealistic movement which issued in the proposition, “The world is my idea” (Vorstellung), and he continues: “But even for the most advanced idealist who seeks to limit his idea of the world to this minimum of content, there remains always the recollection of ‘things’ as they used to be before his conversion to idealism,—as something really existent, or as he used to call them real, as something immediately sure, as immediately cognized, and known and knowable,—as parts of his environment independent of his thought, in contrast with himself and set over against his thought.
- ↑ Avenarius.
