ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that classical philosopher living long enough amongst to penetrate some of our bewildering ways might conclude that our worship of mere life, rather than the good or rational life, and mortally afraid to stop to discriminate between what is worth while and what is not. The same preference for terms of promiscuous all-inclusiveness, rather than for those that involve the discrimination essential to philosophic clarity, shows itself also in the use of the terms experience and reality. The use of the word experience without any ascertainable meaning is perhaps the outstanding scandal of recent philosophy. The absurdity of identifying the whole realm of nature with our little human experience of it is obscured in two ways—to wit, by confusing the nature of possible experience, and by stretching the word experience until it excludes nothing and therefore includes no definite meaning. Instead of accepting experience science discriminates between the experience of truth and the experience of illusion.
