Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/54

 explanation admitting into this physical reality all the ignorance, errors and illusions that the feeblest or most fantastic of minds could be guilty of? Or what gain for mentalism is there in treating knowledge as a part of your mind, when you must say in the same breath that it is only knowledge in virtue of the reality that appears in it? The double nature of knowledge, as the continuity of mind and reality, is the ultimate truth to insist on. The distinction between reality as it is and as we apprehend it is after all ineradicable, and either statement fully and equally insists on it.

Finally, then, you gain nothing in principle by the tenet of the open door—that is, that things walk into your mind and organism just as they are outside it—and you lose nothing by its opposite, that is, that your organism, which you cannot separate from its mind, is one of the conditions which things require for the manifestation of their complete being. The former seems to me a gratuitous hypothesis, recommended only by