MILL S THEORY OF OBJECTIVITY 183 



the conscious elements, that he sets them down as a final in- 

 explicability. 1 Mill is not only a dogmatist; he is a dogmatist 

 who clings to his faith despite what is to him its manifest in 

 sufficiency. It is not as if he simply accepted sensation and 

 memory as equally fundamental facts. Sensation he accepts as a 

 fact. Memory he accepts as an utterly incomprehensible fact. 



Accordingly, for Mill the real is, first, the sensation, and, 

 secondly, the remembered or expected sensation. From both of 

 these must be distinguished the (not actually, but) conditionally 

 expected sensation, that is to say, the possible sensation. The 

 possible sensation is not, as such, real, though it may become 

 real. But, while not real, it has, as merely possible, a perma 

 nence, which the real, as real, has not. Objects are groups of 

 possible sensations, or possibilities of sensation; the terms are 

 not carefully distinguished. 



Objects are not real, though some elements of them may from 

 time to time acquire and lose reality. If the popular, and even 

 the scientific, consciousness regard the object as real, and even 

 as more real than present sensations, that is a delusion which 

 can be satisfactorily accounted for. The possibilities of sensa 

 tion are relatively permanent ; they exhibit extensive uniformities 

 of succession ; and they are cognizable by men in general. Hence 

 their supposed reality. 



Now suppose that, instead of regarding the sensation as a 

 given element of reality, we treat it as a scientific construct, an 

 hypothesis, by means of which the experienced reality is to be 

 in some measure analyzed and explained no more given, no 

 more open to direct observation, than the atom. How would 

 our attitude toward Mill s theory be affected? The question is 

 not an idle one, as the position thus described is that commonly 

 held by psychologists today. When w r e turn aside from dogmatic 

 presuppositions, and ask ourselves how anything is ever per 

 ceived by us as real, it becomes obvious that nothing is ever so 

 perceived except in implied connection with a not-perceived, 



1 More precisely, memory is assumed as inexplicable, while expectation is sup 

 posed to be explicable in terms of memory. 



