Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/440

Rh judgments about B’s room, any more than a Bushman can make false judgments about the integral calculus.

If to our present world there does correspond a second world somewhere off in space, a world exactly like this, where just the same events at every instant do actually take place, still the judgments that we make about our world are not actually true or false with reference to that world, for we mean this world, not that one, when we judge. Why are not John’s Thomas and the real Thomas related like this world and that second world in distant space? Why are not both like the relation of A’s conceived phantom room and B’s real room? Nothing of either real room is ever present to the other. Each prisoner can make true or false judgments if at all, then, only about the pictures on his wall; but neither has even the suggestion that could lead him to make a blunder about the other’s real room, of which he has and can have not the faintest idea.

One reason why we fail to see at once this fact lies in the constant tendency to regard the matter from the point of view of a third person, instead of from the point of view that we still implicitly attribute to A and B themselves. If A could get outside of his room once and see B’s room, then he could say: “My picture was a good one,” or the reverse. But, in the supposed case, he not only never sees B’s room, but he never sees anything but his own pictures, never gets out of his room at all for any purpose. Hence, his sole objects of assertion being his pictures, he is innocent of any power to err about B’s room as it is in itself, even as the man born blind