Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/192

Rh to you, something inaccessible to all human beings besides yourself. But while Reality as such does not imply that what is real is directly accessible, in its details, to the private and finite experience of any or of all men, it is different with the sort of reality which we ascribe to what we usually regard as the material world.

Suppose that I told you that I was well acquainted with the existence and the properties of a material object which I had now and here before me. Suppose that I assured you that I could see, touch, weigh, and otherwise test the reality of this material object, but that I was quite sure that neither you nor any other man could conceivably see it or touch it, or otherwise get the least experience of its presence. Suppose, as a fact, that nobody else ever did verify my report; but that I continued to insist upon the reality, observable for me, of my material object. What would you say of that object of mine? The answer is plain. You would say that my object might indeed be real, but was real solely as a physical phenomenon, to wit, as a collection of states in my mind, in other words, as a certain fixed hallucination of mine. And now I, myself, if indeed I remained sane while I asserted all this, should not hesitate to agree with you, just as surely as I retained my present definition of my material world. For by my material world, I certainly mean a collection of actual and possible experiences of mine such that you too can agree with me about the presence and the describable characters of these experiences, precisely in so far as you have equal opportunities with me to verify their presence and to test with me their peculiar type of Being. The fact that we men find Nature here, implies for us, then, that we