means by its object-world clothed in its variegated garment of secondary qualities, its beauty, and so on, but also what physical science means by its cosmic mechanism of sensible and extra-sensible matter in motion:  whether there is any kind of objective reality belonging to the latter which does not also belong to the former; and how the two worlds are related one to another.  That is to say, he asks whether the bodies in space assumed to exist by the physicist as the antecedent conditions of particular sensations and percepts are independent of mind and perception generally.[152]

In doing all this, philosophy is theoretically free to upset as much of popular belief of the persistent kind as it likes.  Nor can science find fault with it so long as it keeps to its own sphere, and does not directly contradict any truth which science, by the methods proper to it, is able to establish.  Thus, for example, if philosophy finds that there is nothing real independently of mind, science will be satisfied so long as it finds a meaning for its assumed entities, such as space, external things, and physical causes.[153]

The student of philosophy need not be told that these imposing-looking problems respecting cognition, making, up what the Germans call the “Theory of Cognition,” and the cognate problem respecting the nature of reality, are still a long way from being settled.  To-day, as in the days of Plato and Aristotle, are argued, in slightly altered forms, the vexed questions, What is true cognition?  Is it a mere efflux from sensation, a passive conformity of representation to sensation (sensualism or empiricism)? or is it, on the other hand, a construction of active thought, involving certain necessary forms of intelligence (rationalism or intuitivism)?

Again, how are we to shape to ourselves real objective existence?  Is it something wholly independent of the mind (realism)? and if so, is this known to be what we—­meaning here common people and men of science alike—­represent it as being (natural realism), or something different (transfigured realism)?  Or is it, on the contrary, something involving mind (idealism)? and if so, is it a strictly phenomenal distinction within our conscious experience (empirical idealism, phenomenalism), or one of the two poles of subject and object constituted by every act of thought (rational idealism)?  These are some of the questions in philosophy which still await their final answer.

Philosophy being thus still a question and not a solution, we need not here trouble ourselves about its problems further than to remark on their close connection with our special subject, the study of illusion.