ambiguous term 'possibility,' Mill has covertly re-introduced the trans-subjective reality. Real things may very well be described, in reference to our experience, as 'permanent possibilities of sensation,' that is to say, they are the permanent real conditions which, in appropriate circumstances, are ever ready to produce sensations. We may even go further and say that, if any one is determined to be a purist and to define things solely in their relation to sensitive experience – solely from the effects which he finds them to produce – this definition of them as permanent possibilities of sensation is, perhaps, the most accurate we can hope for. And, of course, if Mill's phrase is to be so understood, there is no further difficulty about the extra-conscious existence and the extra-conscious causality of these possibilities, for we are back again upon the solid ground of trans-subjective reality. But it is plain enough that this cannot have been Mill's conscious meaning. "Otherwise," as Mr. Stout says, "he would have committed a circulus in definiendo of the most inexcusable kind." It is equally evident, however, that though Mill may not have intended it, no other meaning will suit the assertions he makes about his possibilities. Under cover of the ambiguity of language, and impelled by the realistic instinct, Mill has simply reinstated the trans-subjective reality in a different form of words. "Ungefähr sagt das der Pfarrer auch, nur mit ein bischen andern Worten." The theory, therefore, which seems so ingenious and plausible indicates in truth the breakdown of subjective idealism. The realist may feel tolerably easy when the talk is of "modifications" taking place in our possibilities of sensation "mostly quite independent of our consciousness and of our presence or absence." But he would be a pedant indeed, who, instead of talking of real things, insisted on substituting the circumlocution 'permanent possibilities of sensation.'
It is not difficult to see how Mill, from his general standpoint in these matters, was led to the phrase and the theory. It is only in sensation, or say rather in perception, that the thing reveals its existence to me or to others. I can only describe it, therefore, in terms of perception; when I do not perceive
