Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/52

36 our consciousness of them. From the falsity of naïve realism he concludes to the truth of subjectivism. Finding that the objects of our immediate perceptions, as well as our consciousness of those objects, depend upon the brain, he concludes that all objects, the brain included, are dependent upon consciousness. And now that we have considered at some length the objections which caused Hume to reject the realistic world which he had deduced from his doctrine of the composite nature of the mind, it may be worth while to point out some of the advantages of such a world. In the first place, it differs from almost every philosopher's world in not being offensive to the plain man. It is disagreeable to that individual to be told by the philosophers that the good world in which he lives, and the objects which he sees and touches, are nothing but states of his own mind. Now the conception which we are considering restores to the plain man his objective world. He can go to sleep at night without any haunting fear that his own body and the bed on which he rests will slip into non-existence as soon as he ceases to perceive them. Nor, secondly, is he, to avoid this preposterous conclusion, compelled to invoke a Berkeleyan God, a veritable deus ex machina, waiting to catch up the perceived objects as fast as he loses sight of them, returning them newly created, and in their proper order, when he awakes in the morning. His God, if he has one, needs not to fulfill the wretched functions of a shadow factory. Nor, thirdly, is it necessary for him, in order to escape the Berkeleyan conception, to suppose that, lurking in the recesses of his being, there is a 'transcendental ego,' a great unwinking eye, by which all things are at all times seen and by that means maintained in existence. These agonizing devices of German and British idealism are needed only after the objective world is reduced to a state of mind, and are quite unnecessary in the realistic world which Hume suggests. For in that world objects do not exist on the sufferance of percipients, either empirical or transcendental, but maintain their existences, whether permanent or transitory, by means of their physical and physiological relations to one another.

But further, we may see that this kind of world differs from