Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/674

 Realism or from that of Idealism, and the nature of our Realism or of our Idealism may vary with the special school of thought to which we may belong. Realism in the first instance admits of two main subdivisions: into Common, or as Mr. Spencer calls it, Crude Realism, and into Metaphysical Realism; and these two forms of it require separate treatment.

Common Realism is the primitive opinion of uneducated and of unreflecting persons, and is in fact simply the absence of any genuine opinion at all. They, I imagine, regard the external objects by which they are surrounded as so many actual entities, not only having an independent existence of their own, but an existence like that which they possess in our consciousness. Thus, an egg they would take to be in reality a white, brittle, hard thing on the outside, having a certain shape, size, and weight, and containing inside the shell a quantity of soft whitish and yellowish substance with a given taste. These qualities, not excepting the taste, taken along with any other qualities that may be disclosed by more careful inquiry, they would conceive to constitute the whole of the egg. It is the same with other objects. What we perceive by our senses is thought by them to be a copy of the real things as they exist in nature, much as the retina of the eye, regarded from without, is seen to contain a copy in miniature of the surrounding scene. Common Realism, however, while it tacitly takes for granted an infinite number of separate entities, cannot account either for the origin of those entities or for their nature. Nor has it any account to give of the origin of life, for material things are in this system utterly destitute of life, and indeed opposed to it. They are precisely what our senses inform us of, and nothing more. Hence they furnish no answers to the questions: How did this world come into being, and how did it reach its present shape? How do men come to exist in it; for matter contains no vitality and no power of infusing vitality into itself? Therefore it is that the adherents of Common Realism are invariably driven back upon a superior being, whom they term a Creator, and who supplies the motive impulse which is wanting in their world.

Metaphysical Realism professes to be the improvement of scholars upon the unsifted notions of the vulgar. It is the sys