There is no physicist or botanist or zooelogist who has not our common experience that things as perceived by us—­our experiences of things—­appear or disappear or change their character when we open or shut our eyes or move about.  But nothing of all this appears in their books.  What they are concerned with is things and their changes, and they do not consider such matters as these as falling within their province.  If a botanist could not distinguish between the changes which take place in a plant, and the changes which take place in his sensations as he is occupied in studying the plant, but should tell us that the plant grows smaller as one recedes from it, we should set him down as weak-minded.

That the distinction is everywhere drawn, and that we must not obliterate it, is very evident.  But we are in the presence of what has seemed to many men a grave difficulty.  Are not things presented in our experience only as we have sensations? what is it to perceive a thing? is it not to have sensations? how, then, can we distinguish between sensations and things?  We certainly do so all the time, in spite of the protest of the philosopher; but many of us do so with a haunting sense that our behavior can scarcely be justified by the reason.

Our difficulty, however, springs out of an error of our own.  Grasping imperfectly the full significance of the word “sensation,” we extend its use beyond what is legitimate, and we call by that name experiences which are not sensations at all.  Thus the external world comes to seem to us to be not really a something contrasted with the mental, but a part of the mental world.  We accord to it the attributes of the latter, and rob it of those distinguishing attributes which belong to it by right.  When we have done this, we may feel impelled to say, as did Professor Pearson, that things are not really “outside” of us, as they seem to be, but are merely “projected” outside—­thought of as if they were “outside.”  All this I must explain at length.

Let us come back to the first of the illustrations given above, the case of the fire in my study.  As I stand and look at it, what shall I call the red glow which I observe?  Shall I call it a quality of a thing, or shall I call it a sensation?

To this I answer:  I may call it either the one or the other, according to its setting among other experiences.

We have seen (section 15) that sensations and things merely imaginary are distinguished from one another by their setting.  With open eyes we see things; with our eyes closed we can imagine them:  we see what is before us; we imagine what lies behind our backs.  If we confine our attention to the bit of experience itself, we have no means of determining whether it is sensory or imaginary.  Only its setting can decide that point.  Here, we have come to another distinction of much the same sort.  That red glow, that bit of experience, taken by itself and abstracted from all other experiences, cannot be called either a sensation or the quality of a thing.  Only its context can give us the right to call it the one or the other.