Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/838

822 things would no doubt appear to him as external to and independent of his own body, but their nature would be for him a mere reflex of his own extremely immature perceptions and notions. He would not be in a position to receive information, and it is sound information which is needed to convince us that the reality of things can be relatively known in the ratio in which our subjective ideas of them are progressively improved. In the absence of such information there would be no object-matter common to the individual and other individuals, and therefore contrasting with perceptions and conceptions which are at once internal to one's own consciousness and subject to amplification through learning from men and books. It is this wider range of object-matter, differentiating the universe as known to the philosophy of cultured mankind from the world as known through the individual's innate or perceptually acquired common sense, which, with its correlative range of systematic ideas, renders possible both positive science, including sociology, and actual social progress.

Objects which are distinct from one another in space, and events which are distinct in either time or place are none the less distinct for being counterparts of one another in their natural characters. Of a pair of vases standing on a mantelshelf on either side of a clock, each vase is as distinct from the other, whose form, color, and other attributes are indistinguishable from its own, as it is distinct from the clock or mantelshelf, whose characters are obviously different. One oscillation of a clock's pendulum is as distinct from another oscillation of the same or from any oscillation of another pendulum as it is from the movement of a human hand, which may have set either pendulum swinging. Twenty new shillings of the same issue are as distinct from one another, as any one of them is distinct from a sovereign or a half-crown.

The logical extension of shillings, or—what amounts to the same thing—the denotation of the term 'shilling,' is the actual number of shillings which have been, are, or will be current.