When the plain man and the man of science maintain that a physical thing exists, they use the word in precisely the same sense.  The meaning they give to it is the proper meaning of the word.  It is justified by immemorial usage, and it marks a real distinction.  Shall we allow the philosopher to tell us that we must not use it in this sense, but must say that only sensations and ideas exist?  Surely not.  This would mean that we permit him to obliterate for us the distinction between the external world and what is mental.

But is it right to use the word “experience” to indicate the phenomena which have a place in the objective order?  Can an experience be anything but mental?

There can be no doubt that the suggestions of the word are unfortunate—­it has what we may call a subjective flavor.  It suggests that, after all, the things we perceive are sensations or percepts, and must, to exist at all, exist in a mind.  As we have seen, this is an error, and an error which we all avoid in actual practice.  We do not take sensations for things, and we recognize clearly enough that it is one thing for a material object to exist and another for it to be perceived.

Why, then, use the word “experience”?  Simply because we have no better word.  We must use it, and not be misled by the associations which cling to it.  The word has this great advantage:  it brings out clearly the fact that all our knowledge of the external world rests ultimately upon those phenomena which, when we consider them in relation to our senses, we recognize as sensations.  We cannot start out from mere imaginings to discover what the world was like in the ages past.

It is this truth that is recognized by the plain man, when he maintains that, in the last resort, we can know things only in so far as we see, touch, hear, taste, and smell them; and by the psychologist, when he tells us that, in sensation, the external world is revealed as directly as it is possible that it could be revealed.  But it is a travesty on this truth to say that we do not know things, but know only our sensations of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and the like.[1]

[1] See the note on this chapter at the close of the volume.

CHAPTER V

APPEARANCES AND REALITIES

19.  THINGS AND THEIR APPEARANCES.—­We have seen in the last chapter that there is an external world and that it is given in our experience.  There is an objective order, and we are all capable of distinguishing between it and the subjective.  He who says that we perceive only sensations and ideas flies in the face of the common experience of mankind.

But we are not yet through with the subject.  We all make a distinction between things as they appear and things as they really are.

If we ask the plain man, What is the real external world? the first answer that seems to present itself to his mind is this:  Whatever we can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell may be regarded as belonging to the real world.  What we merely imagine does not belong to it.