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
instinctively, in view of the known circumstances in which the absent
experience is conceived to have occurred. The only instrument for
conceiving experience at large is accordingly private imagination; and
such imagination cannot be tested, although it may be guided and perhaps
recast by fresh observations or reports concerning the action and language
of other people. For action and language, being contagious, and being the
material counterpart of experience in each of us, may voluntarily or
involuntarily suggest our respective experience to one another, by causing
each to re-enact more or less accurately within himself the experience of
the rest. Thus alien thoughts and feelings are revealed or suggested to us
in common life, not without a subjective transformation increasing, so to
speak, as the square of the distance: and even the record of experience in
people's own words, when these are not names for recognisable external
things, awakens in the reader, in another age or country, quite
incommensurable ideas.
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