Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/209

No. 2.] Schiller means "those who deny that there is any reality," I do not know who those persons may be – unless the word reality is used for what is self-contradictory and meaningless. "That everything that is is real" is either a purely verbal proposition or, if it means that every datum of consciousness is real in all, including the fullest, senses of reality, it is a falsehood.

The first of the questions which Mr. Schiller enumerates (on p. 535) is: "How do we know that there is any reality at all, or how do we come to assert an external world?" Apparently in this question "reality" is meant to be identical with "the external world." But, "external" to what? By "external world" the plain man means the world outside his own body: is then his own body not "real"? If "the external world" be taken to include the body of the speaker, he can only mean by it (I can see no other intelligible meaning) all that is in space, and the word "external" is being awkwardly used, as it often is, to mean "extended": are my thoughts and volitions, then, unreal?

[In this connection, I may note a very strange passage in Prof. A. Seth's article in the same number of this. "The table," he says (p. 514), "which is in immediate contact with my organism is as completely and inexorably outside the world of my consciousness as the most distant 'star and system visible upon the bosom of the night.' Though I press my hand against it, it is no more present in consciousness than is the friend on the other side of the globe whose image rises at the moment in my mind." Now unless "the world of my consciousness" be identified with the bodily organism, to say that a thing is outside the world of my consciousness can only be a metaphorical way of saying that I am not conscious of the thing or (if stress be laid on "world") that I never have been or never can be conscious of the thing. It is true I only feel resistance, hardness, smoothness, etc., but when I interpret these sensations by the idea of a table, surely the table is inside my consciousness, in the only intelligible sense that can be given to that spatial metaphor. The table does not indeed come inside my organism, unless the contact be very violent.]

In a foot-note on p. 537 Mr. Schiller seems to argue that because our dreams are judged unreal from the standpoint of our waking life, our waking life can only be judged real from the standpoint of some other life. This at least is the only meaning [?] I can extract from the passage. But Mr. Schiller's argument would involve a regressio ad infinitum: we never could know anything to be