Page:Appearance and Reality (1916).djvu/38

 attended by $$c$$, or $$d$$, or $$e$$, or any one of a number of other qualities, you cannot go from this to the result that $$A$$ exists and works naked. The secondary $$b$$ can be explained, you urge, as issuing from the primary $$A$$, without consideration of aught else. Let it be so; but all that could follow is, that the special natures of $$A$$’s accompaniments are not concerned in the process. There is not only no proof, but there is not even the very smallest presumption, that $$A$$ could act by itself, or could be a real fact if alone. It is doubtless scientific to disregard certain aspects when we work; but to urge that therefore such aspects are not fact, and that what we use without regard to them is an independent real thing,—this is barbarous metaphysics.

We have found then that, if the secondary qualities are appearance, the primary are certainly not able to stand by themselves. This distinction, from which materialism is blindly developed, has been seen to bring us no nearer to the true nature of reality.