e
existence of the latter is merely a matter of belief.

To understand this theory, we must construe its nomenclature into, the
language of the present day. What, then, is the modern synonym for the
"ideas," "representations," "phantasms," and "species," which the theory
in question declares to be vicarious of real objects? There cannot be a
doubt that the word _perception_ is that synonym. So that the
representative theory, when fairly interpreted, amounts simply to
this;--that the mind is immediately cognisant, not of real objects
themselves, but _only of its own perceptions of real objects_. To accuse
the representationist of maintaining a doctrine more repugnant to common
sense than this, or in any way different from it, would be both
erroneous and unjust. The golden rule of philosophical criticism is, to
give every system the benefit of the most favourable interpretation
which it admits of.

This, then, is the true version of representationism,--namely, that our
perceptions of material things, and not material things _per se_, are
the proximate objects of our consciousness when we hold intercourse with
the external universe.

Now, this is a doctrine which inevitably emerges the instant that the
analysis of the perception of matter is set on foot and admitted. When a
philosopher divides, or imagines that he divides, the perception of
matter into two things, perception _and_ matter, holding the former to
be a state of his own mind, and the latter to be no such state; he does,
in that analysis, and without saying one other word, avow himself to be
a thoroughgoing representationist. For his analysis declares that, in
perception, the mind has an immediate or proximate, and a mediate or
remote object. Its perception of matter is the proximate object--the
object of its consciousness; matter itself, the material existence, is
the remote object--the object of its belief. But such a doctrine is
representationism, in the strictest sense of the word. It is the very
essence and definition of the representative theory to recognise, in
perception, a remote as well as a proximate object of the mind. Every
system which does this, is necessarily a representative system. The
doctrine which treats the perception of matter analytically does this;
therefore the analytic or psychological doctrine is identical with the
representative theory. Both hold that the perceptive process involves
two objects--an immediate and a mediate; and not