mysteries revealed to all, which teach what the truth of things of sense is.
Those who put forward such assertions really themselves say, if we bear in mind what we remarked before, the direct opposite of what they mean:—a fact which is perhaps best able to bring them to reflect on the nature of the certainty of sense-experience. They speak of the "existence" of external objects, which can be more precisely characterised as actual, absolutely particular, wholly personal, individual things, each of them not like anything or anyone else; this is the existence which they say has absolute certainty and truth. They "mean" this bit of paper I am writing on, or rather have written on: but they do not say what they "mean." If they really wanted to say this bit of paper which they "mean," and they wanted to say so, that is impossible, because the This of sense, which is "meant," cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e. to what is inherently universal. In the very attempt to say it, it would, therefore, crumble in their hands; those who have begun to describe it would not be able to finish doing so: they would have to hand it over to others, who would themselves in the last resort have to confess to speaking about a thing that has no being. They "mean," then, doubtless this bit of paper here, which is quite different from that bit over there; but they speak of actual things, external or sensible objects, absolutely individual, real, and so on; that is, they say about them what is simply universal. Consequently what is called unspeakable is nothing else than what is untrue, irrational, something barely and simply "meant."
If nothing is said of a thing except that it is an actual
