images and ideas suggested by them, and is a real world against which idealism finds nothing to say. 'Crude realism' supplies no argument for the plausibility of epistemological realism except by taking advantage of the ambiguity in the word 'external.'
But how, one may well ask one's self, is it possible that a philosophical thinker like Professor Seth can have come to maintain such a proposition as that knowledge is of that which is external to consciousness? Sympathy with Reid is an inadequate explanation. My suggestion is that Professor Seth has not really escaped from a confusion between psychology and epistemology; or, to put it rather more accurately, his theory of knowledge depends upon a juxtaposition in the same sentence of the abstractions of the psychologist and the abstractions of ordinary language and of the special sciences. I must explain this in greater detail. "The world of consciousness on the one hand," we are told, "and the (so far hypothetical) world of real things on the other, are two mutually exclusive spheres. No member of the real sphere can intrude itself into the conscious sphere, nor can consciousness go out into the real sphere and, as it were, lay hold with hands upon a real object."[1] This passage suggests some of the same difficulties to which I have already referred. If the world of my consciousness excludes the real world, are my internal, my mental, experiences not real? Is it a delusion on my part that at this moment I am thinking of an article of Professor Seth's? On the other hand, the moment I have put down these words on paper, are the visible written words excluded from the world of my consciousness? Again, in which sphere is my body? I do not see how I can describe various bodily sensations of which I am very distinctly conscious as outside the world of my consciousness. If anything I know or think of is excluded from my consciousness because I know it, the sphere of my consciousness must be completely empty. If the sphere of my consciousness is not empty, I cannot see on what principle anything that I know is excluded from it.
- ↑ I, p. 515.
