Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/531

515 that you now verify by your sense-perceptions,—but, once more, "the world that the people tell about," the world for whose existence you find the warrant in the more or less stable agreement of your fellow-men.

It is an old observation, that without faith in one's fellows nobody can even stir in this our everyday world. A thorough-going doubter of the data revealed by the social consciousness would have no place in our human universe. For every man the streets of his city are fairly paved for him with reports about what is true in social, legal, commercial, physical, medical, and moral matters. Leave out the substance of all such reports from the beliefs of our supposed doubter, and he could not stir beyond his threshold without sinking in a mire of unconquerable mysteries.

Now so far, I say, the actual dependence of the individual upon society for the content of his beliefs about the external world is so obvious as to need here no further comment. But while all admit this prevalence of the social element in the formation of the substance, the stuff, of our current beliefs about the outer world, probably not all of you are prepared to follow me in the thesis to which I shall next be led. For my thesis will now refer, not merely to the material of which our external world is composed, but to the very conception of externality itself. This thesis is, that, while the factor furnished by personal verification, by private experience of the facts of perception, plays an unquestionable and very important part in the formation of our general conception of external reality, it is, at least, very probable that the social factor plays a still larger part, not only, as just pointed out, in supplying us with a notion of what individual facts the external world contains, but also in determining our very fundamental notion itself of what we now mean by externality. This, I say, is my present thesis. Let me explain it a little before I go further. I, of course, do not doubt that the infant, in the early stages of its life, before its social consciousness is developed, and