Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/326

Rh sive acceptance of what is in consciousness, and you have no belief in an external world. An addition to the data of consciousness, a more or less clearly voluntary reaction, is involved in your idea of external reality. The truth of this principle appears when your belief in any particular object is called in question. You hold that you see yonder a snowy mountain. Your companion insists that beyond the wide misty valley there is to be seen only a gray cloud. You reassert your belief, and in the reassertion feel more definitely than at first the active addition of your own belief to the meagre data of sense. The addition existed, however, in your first assertion. Or again, one man is trying, perchance in sport, to make another doubt the existence of material objects. “There is no external matter,” says the first. “There are but these states of consciousness in our minds. Nothing beyond them corresponds to them.” The second, maintaining the position of the man of common sense, retorts sharply: “Doubtless I cannot refute altogether your fine-spun arguments; but they are nevertheless nonsense. For I persist in believing in this world of sense. I live in it, I work for it, my fellows believe in it, our hearts are bound up in it, our success depends upon our faith. Only dreamers doubt it. I am not a dreamer. Here is a stone; I hit it. Here is a precipice; I fear and shun it. My strongest conviction is concerned with the existence of this world of sense. Do your worst; I am not afraid of talk.” Thus then by every device of the active spirit, by reminding himself of his most cherished interests, of his affections and hatreds, by