Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/557

No. 5.] What then is the result of a critical survey of the various criteria of reality? Is it not that though all may be of service, none can be entirely relied upon as the ratio cognoscendi of reality? There is no royal road to omniscience any more than to omnipotence, even though we do not hold with Mr. Ritchie that the two coincide. The cognition of reality is a slow and arduous process, and of its possession we cannot be sure until we possess it whole. The only certain and ultimate test of reality is the absence of internal friction, is its undisputed occupation of the field of consciousness, in a word, its self-evidence. It is because reality does not display this character that thought has to be called in to interpret it. If it did, there would be no distinction between real and unreal, between what is 'real-ly' presented and 'merely imagined,' between the self and the world, and there would be no such thing as thought. As Professor James so well points out (Psychology, II, 287) a hallucinatory candle occupying the whole field of consciousness would be equivalent to a real one. But as a matter of fact the contents of consciousness present no such permanence and self-evidence; their initial state is a fleeting succession of conflicting presentations which supplant and contradict one another. Some of these are frequently followed by painful, others by pleasurable feelings, and the penalty of idle acquiescence in the flux of phenomena is rapid death. So a dire necessity is laid upon the subject to distinguish himself from the world, and to set about thinking how phenomena may be controlled. He naturally begins by ascribing to the phenomena which are followed by pains or other practically important consequences a reality not shared by the rest. This first interpretation of the chaos of presentations is probably the first for which we can have direct testimony, and represents the view of reality taken by savages and small children. It is merely an extension of this view when the "plain man," in the condition of "natural realism" distinguishes hallucinations, fancies, and dreams from true reality.

To effect this he uses whatever tests seem most practically useful — among others those of "coherence" and "consistency." Thus, the plain man's view is simply the first stage in the attempt to reach a harmony of the real. The view of the physicists represents a second and subsequent stage. And Mr. Ritchie's philosophy of the ultimate nature of reality is possibly a third. Each leads on to the other, because each is successively recognized not to be a coherent and consistent account of the world and not to eliminate the irrational and unsatisfactory element in experience. The plain man's 'things,' the physicist's 'atoms,' and Mr. Ritchie's 'Absolute,' are all of them more or less persevering and well-considered schemes to interpret the primary reality of phenomena, and in this sense Mr. Ritchie is entitled to call the "sunrise" a theory (p. 274). But the chaos of presentations, out of which we have