Each agent or subject of experience might, at other times,
become an object of experience also: for they all formed part of a
material world, which they might envisage in common in their perceptions.
Now the criticism which repudiates this common material medium, like all
criticism or doubt, is secondary and partial: it continues to operate with
all the assumptions of common sense, save the one which it is expressly
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.
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