ABSTRACT
So far we have said that we propose to study human experience phenomenologically, taking the objects we encounter for what they give themselves out to be, and not allowing them to be replaced by what, on some sophisticated theory of the world, really is there, or by what, on some equally sophisticated theory of the mind, really is given. We have further said that we propose to study human experience eidetically or in terms of general ideas or essences, and we have gone into some difficulties of such treatment, and have stressed its primary connection with what we called ‘logical values’ rather than with any special character of the thought-contents involved. We have also defended an eidetic treatment against many recent attacks on it, which condemn it as the typical mistake or disorder of philosophers. We have, further, refused to limit the ideas used in cave-delineation to any set arrived at by us in some special approved manner, whether by ourselves encountering an instance which illustrates such an idea, or by having such an instance pointed out to us or shown to us by others. The various forms of narrowly empiricist theories, which limit communicable ideas or meanings to what, in their last elements or forms at least, have somewhere confronted us (or will somewhere confront us) in our encounters with individuals through the senses, and which are there for others as much as for ourselves, are not made the basis of our investigations. We leave open the possibility, of which there would seem to be instances, that all of us dispose of and can use many ideas that cannot plausibly be thought part of what we encounter through the senses, though we are no doubt incited to make use of them by what is thus sensibly encountered, and that we likewise all dispose of arts, whether involving words or a mustering and manipulation of things, of inciting others to make use of similar 63ideas. It is perhaps better not to make use of traditional terms like ‘innate ideas’ or ‘a priori concepts’, which involve many misleading suggestions: the general possibility that they represent is, however, as unrefuted and as important as it was in the days of Descartes and Kant. Immense difficulties of course surround the notion of an unillustrable concept, which are not readily solved by such hypotheses as that of a God who imprints hall-marks on the minds of his creatures, nor by obscure manoeuvres with pure intuitions, schemata and what not. But it is a mark of a responsible philosophy never lightly to reject anything that has a colourable claim to be ‘fundamental’, merely because we have no satisfactorily shaped theory of its ‘possibility’. The full explanation of all the ideas we do have may well take us far beyond anything like ordinary human experience.
