And a man may go through the world avoiding disaster year after year by distinguishing with some success between what is real and what is not real, and yet he may be quite unable to tell us what, in general, it means for a thing to be real.  Some things are real and some are not; as a rule he seems to be able to discover the difference; of his method of procedure he has never tried to give an account to himself.

That he has a mind he cannot doubt, and he has some idea of the difference between it and certain other minds; but even the most ardent champion of the plain man must admit that he has the most hazy of notions touching the nature of his mind.  He seems to be more doubtful concerning the nature of the mind and its knowledge than he is concerning the nature of external things.  Certainly he appears to be more willing to admit his ignorance in this realm.

And yet the man can hold his own in the world of real things.  He can distinguish between this thing and that, this place and that, this time and that.  He can think out a plan and carry it into execution; he can guess at the contents of other minds and allow this knowledge to find its place in his plan.

All of which proves that our knowledge is not necessarily useless because it is rather dim and vague.  It is one thing to use a mental state; it is another to have a clear comprehension of just what it is and of what elements it may be made up.  The plain man does much of his thinking as we all tie our shoes and button our buttons.  It would be difficult for us to describe these operations, but we may perform them very easily nevertheless.  When we say that we know how to tie our shoes, we only mean that we can tie them.

Now, enough has been said in the preceding sections to make clear that the vagueness which characterizes many notions which constantly recur in common thought is not wholly dispelled by the study of the several sciences.  The man of science, like the plain man, may be able to use very well for certain purposes concepts which he is not able to analyze satisfactorily.  For example, he speaks of space and time, cause and effect, substance and qualities, matter and mind, reality and unreality.  He certainly is in a position to add to our knowledge of the things covered by these terms.  But we should never overlook the fact that the new knowledge which he gives us is a knowledge of the same kind as that which we had before.  He measures for us spaces and times; he does not tell us what space and time are.  He points out the causes of a multitude of occurrences; he does not tell us what we mean whenever we use the word “cause.”  He informs us what we should accept as real and what we should repudiate as unreal; he does not try to show us what it is to be real and what it is to be unreal.

In other words, the man of science extends our knowledge and makes it more accurate; he does not analyze certain fundamental conceptions, which we all use, but of which we can usually give a very poor account.