Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/210

196 real, if an extraneous standpoint were always necessary. In the sense which reality bears to the plain man (which is all that I am considering in the passage Mr. Schiller is criticising), no extraneous criterion is needed; our waking life is real because our experiences are coherent with one another. If any one maintains, not merely in a moment of poetic or other frenzy, but in his serious leisure, that "it is a mad world," he is a sceptic or a fanatic with whom philosophical argument is a waste of time, for he has taken away our only possible criterion of madness – the rationality of coherent experience. (Similarly if any one maintains pessimism in the literal sense of the term, viz., that this is the worst of all possible worlds, he is claiming to have a criterion of "good" and "bad" outside the region of human experience which alone gives a meaning to "good" and "bad.")

On p. 538 Mr. Schiller quotes my three "tests" of reality: "The agreement between the inferences drawn from the experiences of our different senses, the agreement between the judgments of different persons, and the harmony of present experience with the results of our and their previous experience, constitute between them the test of reality." (p. 267.) Yet, on p. 539, he says: "But perhaps Mr. Ritchie does not contend that any one of his criteria is singly sufficient as a test of reality and proposes to employ them collectively." Why "perhaps"? "Reality" in ordinary use has different grades. Each test alone assures us of a certain degree of reality; only the combination of all assures us of reality in the fullest sense which that term bears in the practical affairs of life, which determine what is "real" to the ordinary sane person. On p. 538 Mr. Schiller rejects the agreement between the testimonies of our different senses as a test of reality, and yet he adopts (on p. 540) the "practical test" suggested by Prof. James: "that is adjudged real which has intimate relation to our emotional and active life." But "practical convenience" is just a part of the experience of our senses.

With regard to my argument (on p. 267) that "if A seems to himself to see a mouse run across the floor, but if B, C, D, E, and F, being all present, having good eyesight, and looking in the same direction, maintain truly that they saw nothing, A may well doubt the reality of that mouse," Mr. Schiller asks "how is it to be established that A, who does see it, does not considerably surpass them in the delicacy of his senses?" Well, that is a matter that can surely be tested by other experiences. I suggested an appeal to a