vii REALITY AND IDEALISM 113 



once he has conceded the objectivity of the phenomena 

 which form the content of consciousness, he is not entitled 

 to revert to the prior question. In other words, the 

 discussion of the question What is reality ? presupposes 

 a settlement of the question Is there reality ? in the 

 affirmative. It is only when reality has been admitted to 

 exist that we can begin to distinguish the real from the 

 unreal, and to enumerate the different sorts and criteria 

 of each. 



It is necessary in the next place to put the primitive 

 datum explicandum in the proper light. The primary 

 psychological fact is that everything that is is real, and 

 that the burden of proof lies on those who deny that 

 anything is real. Nor does Mr. Ritchie dispute this, 

 though he minimises its importance, and apparently fails to 

 see that reality in this sense rests on a totally different 

 footing from all others. For it is the primary fact which 

 all the rest are more or less complete theories to explain, 

 and to which they must be referred in order to test their 

 validity. If they prove capable of explaining what they 

 set out to explain, we may reach a loftier view of reality, 

 which will transfigure our primary datum for us, but 

 which even so cannot be considered in abstraction from 

 its basis ; if they do not, the other senses of reality 

 are worthless. For their work is hypothetical and 

 derivative, and if the conditions under which we ascribed 

 reality to these interpreters of reality are not fulfilled, 

 their raison d etre has vanished. But reality survives 

 even though its inscrutable flux of phenomena should 

 laugh to scorn the attempts at comprehending it which 

 it provokes. 



But this unique position of primary reality Mr. Ritchie 

 quite fails to appreciate. 1 Hence it is on the basis of an 



1 He does not even succeed in proving the unreality of dreams, by saying 

 that they are not self-coherent nor follow in an intelligible sequence on the 

 events of previous dreams. For their incoherence is not, as a rule, intrinsic, 

 nor anything that exists for the dream consciousness in the actual experiencing : 

 it is an ex post facto judgment (resting usually on an imperfect memory) which is 

 passed on them in our waking life. But awaking involves a breach of continuity, 

 and the consciousness which condemns the dream-experience is no longer the 

 consciousness which experienced it. And are we so sure that the coherence of 

 our waking life would survive a similar breach of continuity, such as might be 



I 



