336 IDEALISM AND COMMON SENSE 



566. These two views, entirely incompatible but often inter- 

 mixed, the idealist and the common sense, carry with them 

 consequences that are immensely important to the thinker. Since 

 the idealist supposes that he is aware of nothing but the phenomena 

 happening in his own mind, he is unable to account for their 

 appearances, their coexistences, and their sequences. 1 Even after 

 being trained by common sense to think coherently, he can do no 

 more than observe and record them. Thus he observes that in the 

 compound phenomenon ' dog' there tends to coexist the subsidiary 

 phenomena canine trunk, head, limbs, and tail ; and that, when the 

 phenomenon dog has the appearance of biting the phenomenon 

 idealist, there tends to succeed the phenomenon pain in the 

 phenomenon leg. But he has not the remotest idea why certain 

 phenomena tend to coexist with the phenomenon canine body, 

 nor why the appearance of biting should be followed by the 

 feeling of pain. He is, or should be, bound by the terms of his 

 philosophy not to pass outside the circle of his own feelings, and 

 therefore cannot, or at any rate should not, explain the dog and 

 the feeling of pain by the theory of evolution through Natural 

 Selection. For, of course, the notion of Natural Selection (which 

 is supposed to have occupied millions of years) occurring amidst 

 the phenomena, the mere phenomena, of his mind is exquisitely 

 absurd. It is true that most modern idealists, like most cultured 

 people whose culture is not entirely in the air, are adherents of the 

 theory of Natural Selection ; but when they are so they are 

 thinking in common-sense terms, and an absurdity is none the less 

 because an inconsistency is added. It follows that all notions 

 of causation, in the meaning the word ordinarily bears in the 

 language, are as inconceivable to the consistent idealist as are 

 material bodies. For him the word implies nothing more than 

 mere invariable succession not a succession which is invariable 

 because it results from the unvarying action on each other of material 

 bodies which have unvarying properties. Accordingly he declares, 

 now with some approach to consistency, that the mission of science 

 something which causes the common sensations. To me, on the other hand, it 

 seems that we have no title to believe in other minds unless we first believe in 

 real bodies external to our own minds. That, moreover, appears to be the order 

 in which the human mind acquires these beliefs. To this day, as when giving 

 chloroform, I draw my inferences about other minds by the behaviour of what 

 I conceive to be the material bodies associated with them. 



1 " Another inference, apparently more paradoxical still, needs to be made, 

 though, as far as I am aware, Dr Hodgson is the only writer who has explicitly 

 drawn it. That inference is that feelings, not causing nerve-actions, cannot even 

 cause each other " (James, Principles of Psychology, vol. i. p. 133). 



