If I accept this doctrine, as it seems I must, am I not forced to conclude that the reality which is given in my experience, the reality with which I have contrasted appearances and to which I have referred them, is, after all, itself only an appearance?  The touch things which I have hitherto regarded as the real things that make up the external world, the touch things for which all my visual experiences have served as signs, are, then, not themselves real external things, but only the appearances under which real external things, themselves imperceptible, manifest themselves to me.

It seems, then, that I do not directly perceive any real thing, or, at least, anything that can be regarded as more than an appearance.  What, then, is the external world?  What are things really like?  Can we give any true account of them, or are we forced to say with the skeptics that we only know how things seem to us, and must abandon the attempt to tell what they are really like?

Now, before one sets out to answer a question it is well to find out whether it is a sensible question to ask and a sensible question to try to answer.  He who asks:  Where is the middle of an infinite line?  When did all time begin?  Where is space as a whole? does not deserve a serious answer to his questions.  And it is well to remember that he who asks:  What is the external world like? must keep his question a significant one, if he is to retain his right to look for an answer at all.  He has manifestly no right to ask us:  How does the external world look when no one is looking?  How do things feel when no one feels them?  How shall I think of things, not as I think of them, but as they are?

If we are to give an account of the external world at all, it must evidently be an account of the external world; i.e. it must be given in terms of our experience of things.  The only legitimate problem is to give a true account instead of a false one, to distinguish between what only appears and is not real and what both appears and is real.

Bearing this in mind, let us come back to the plain man’s experience of the world.  He certainly seems to himself to perceive a real world of things, and he constantly distinguishes, in a way very serviceable to himself, between the merely apparent and the real.  There is, of course, a sense in which every experience is real; it is, at least, an experience; but when he contrasts real and apparent he means something more than this.  Experiences are not relegated to this class or to that merely at random, but the final decision is the outcome of a long experience of the differences which characterize different individual experiences and is an expression of the relations which are observed to hold between them.  Certain experiences are accepted as signs, and certain others come to take the more dignified position of thing signified; the mind rests in them and regards them as the real.