298 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



in the sense of familiarity, no idea could be clearer than this. Every 

 child uses it with perfect confidence, never dreaming that he does not 

 understand it. As for clearness in its second grade, however, it would 

 probably puzzle most men, even among those of a reflective turn of 

 mind to arive an abstract definition of the real. Yet such a definition 

 may perhaps be reached by considering the points of difference be- 

 tween reality and its opposite, fiction. A figment is a product of 

 somebody's imagination ; it has such characters as his thought im- 

 presses upon it. That whose characters are independent of how you or 

 I think is an external reality. There are, however, phenomena within 

 our own minds, dependent upon our thought, which are at the same time 

 real in the sense that we really think them. But though their char- 

 acters depend on how we think, they do not depend on what we think 

 those characters to be. Thus, a dream has a real existence as a men- 

 tal phenomenon, if somebody has really dreamt it ; that he dreamt so 

 and so, does not depend on what anybody thinks was dreamt, but is 

 completely independent of all opinion on the subject. On the other 

 hand, considering, not the fact of dreaming, but the thing dreamt, it 

 retains its peculiarities by virtue of no other fact than that it was 

 dreamt to possess them. Thus we may define the real as that whose 

 characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be. 



But, however satisfactory such a definition may be found, it would 

 be a great mistake to suppose that it makes the idea of reality per- 

 fectly clear. Here, then, let us apply our rules. According to them, 

 reality, like every other quality, consists in the peculiar sensible effects 

 which things partaking of it produce. The only effect which real 

 things have is to cause belief, for all the sensations which they excite 

 emerge into consciousness in the form of beliefs. The question there- 

 fore is, how is true belief (or belief in the real) distinguished from 

 false belief (or belief in fiction). Now, as we have seen in the former 

 paper, the ideas of truth and falsehood, in their full development, ap- 

 pertain exclusively to the scientific method of settling opinion. A 

 person who arbitrarily chooses the propositions which he Avill adopt 

 can use the word truth only to emphasize the expression of his deter- 

 mination to hold on to his choice. Of course, the method of tenacity 

 never prevailed exclusively; reason is too natural to men for that. 

 But in the literature of the dark ages we find some fine examples of it. 

 When Scotus Erigena is commenting upon a poetical passage in which 

 hellebore is spoken of as having caused the death of Socrates, he does 

 not hesitate to inform the inquiring reader that Helleborus and Soc- 

 rates were two eminent Greek philosophers, and that the latter having 

 been overcome in argument by the former took the matter to heart 

 and died of it ! What sort of an idea of truth could a man have who 

 could adopt and teach, without the qualification of a perhaps, an opin- 

 ion taken so entirely at random ? The real spirit of Socrates, who I 

 hope would have been delighted to have been " overcome in argu- 



