The Metaphysical Foundation of Buddhism and Modern Science

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But whether we be ancient or modern, we can only deal with things, in
some sense, experienced. The Greeks dealt with things that they thought
they experienced, and Hume merely asked, what do we experience? This
is exactly the question which Plato and Aristotle thought that they were
answering.
To speak of anything, is to speak of something which, by reason of that
very speech, is in some way a component in that act of experience. In
some sense or other, it is thereby known to exist. This is what Plato
pointed out when he wrote, Not-being is itself a sort of being.
Speech consists of noises, or visible shapes, which elicit an experience of
things other than themselves. In so far as vocables fail to elicit a stable
coordination of sound-character, or shape-character, to meaning, those
vocables fail to function as speech. And in so far as some meaning is not
in some sense directly experienced, there is no meaning conveyed. To
point at nothing is not to point.
To speak of the same thing twice is to demonstrate that the being of
that thing is independent of either singular act of speech, unless we
believe that the two acts presuppose each other or are both presupposed
by the thing spoken of. If we cannot speak of the same thing twice,
knowledge vanishes taking philosophy with it. Thus, since speech can be
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