Mental Processes in Man. 315 



and that a truer analogy is that something stands without 

 and knocks at the doorway of sense, and that from the 

 nature of the knocks we learn somewhat concerning that 

 which knocks. The person inside can never open the door 

 to see what manner of thing it is which knocks. But he 

 can build up a most cunning symbolism of knocks which 

 shall suffice for all practical purposes. In other words, 

 the object-world, symbolic though it is, which you and I 

 and the rest of us construct at the bidding of something 

 without us (the existence of which I assume), is amply 

 sufficient for all our practical needs, and constitutes the 

 only practical reality for human-folk. 



I am well aware that there are many people who 

 cannot bring themselves to believe in, or even to listen 

 without impatience to, the view that the world we see 

 around us is a world of phenomena. It is absurd, they 

 say, to tell us that yonder tulip, "as an object, is in any 

 sense dependent on our perception of it. There it is, and 

 there it would have been had man never been created. 

 Can one conceive that the new species of fossil, which was 

 only yesterday disentombed from the strata in which it has 

 lain buried for long ages, is dependent on man's observa- 

 tion for its qualities as an object? To say that it was 

 ** constructed" by the lucky geologist who was fortunate 

 enough first to set eyes on it is sheer nonsense. Its shelly 

 substance protected a bivalve mollusc millions of years 

 before man appeared upon the earth. When we see the 

 orange in the fruiterer's shop, the sight of it merely 

 reminds us of its other qualities — its taste, its smell, its 

 weight, and the rest, which are essentially its own, and no 

 endowments of ours — nowise bestowed upon it by us. 



I have no hope of convincing, and not much desire to 

 convince, one who thus objects. I would merely ask him 

 how and when he stepped outside his own consciousness to 

 ascertain that these things are so. Does he believe that 

 consciousness is an accompaniment of certain nervous pro- 

 cesses in the grey cortex of the brain ? If so, let him tell 

 us how these conscious accompaniments resemble (not 



