we speak of as realities. Both appearance and reality are given in sensation, and we observe a connection between them. They belong to the same order of experiences.
Thus, I may sit in the highest gallery of the opera house, and may say: What looks like a row of small shiny discs in the parquet is really a row of bald heads. Be it remarked that the reality in this case is a something that can unequivocally be located; it is in the parquet, and it occupies space. It can be seen close at hand, and it can be touched with the fingers. May I say that what seems to be a, brainchange in one of these heads really is a sensation of sound? Is the sensation of sound there? does it occupy space? is it literally in the head?
Evidently we are here again concerned only with 'a, manner of speech'—with a loose expression which cloaks one's ignorance, and which borrows what force it has from a false analogy. If we say that the sensation of sound is the 'reality' and the brain-change the 'appearance,' we abuse two respectable words, in common use, that nave a right to better treatment.
The truth is that it is better to recognize that mental phenomena must not be conceived after the analogy of material things at all. We may, of course, go on talking about mind and body as other people do. In common life a pedantic exactitude of expression is out of place. But when we try to be scientific we must strip off crude inherited materialisms, the echoes of a remote past.
The man who has done this the most completely is the parallelist. The limits of this paper prevent me from setting forth his doctrine, but I have elsewhere[1] tried to show simply and clearly just how much he has a right to mean by it. He denies frankly that the mind is in the body, as also that one has the right to hint, by the use of vague and ambiguous material analogies, that it is somehow in the body. It was a philosopher of the seventeenth century who first thought out the doctrine, but it was a scientist of the nineteenth century, Professor W. K. Clifford, who made it popular to us moderns. To him much of the credit for the present revival of the doctrine must be accorded.
- ↑ 'An Introduction to Philosophy,' N. Y., 1906, chapter IX.
