criticising. So, in repudiating the material world, this philosophy
retains the notion of various agents or subjects gathering experience; and
we are not expected to doubt that there are just as many streams of
experience without a world, as there were people in the world when the
world existed. But the number and nature of these experiences have now
become undiscoverable, the material persons having been removed who
formerly were so placed as to gather easily imagined experiences, and to
be able to communicate them; and the very notion of experience has been
emptied of its meaning, when no external common world subsists to impose
that same experience on everybody. It was not knowledge of existing
experiences _in vacuo_ that led common sense to assume a material world,
but knowledge of an existing material world led it to assume existing, and
regularly reproducible, experiences.

Thus the whole social convention posited by empirical idealism is borrowed
without leave, and rests on the belief in nature for which it is
substituted.


VIII

Page 21. _The literary psychologist may come very near to the truth of
experience._

Experience cannot be in itself an object of science, because it is
essentially invisible, immeasurable, fugitive, and private; and although
it may be shared or repeated, the evidence for that repetition or that
unanimity cannot be found by comparing a present experience with another
experience by hypothesis absent. Both the absent experience and its
agreement with the present experience must be imagined freely and credited