st, 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.

That this answer is not a very satisfactory one occurred to men's minds
very early in the history of reflective thought. The ancient skeptic
said to himself: The colors of objects vary according to the light, and
according to the position and distance of the objects; can we say that
any object has a real color of its own? A staff