272 PSYCHOLOOY. 



we cannot help supposing. Tlie judgment that my thought 

 has the same object as his thought is what makes the 

 psychologist call mj thought cognitive of an outer reality. 

 The judgment that my own past thought and my own pres- 

 ent thought are of the same object is what makes me take 

 the object out of either and jjroject it by a sort of triangu- 

 lation into an independent position, from which it may 

 appear to both. Sameness in a multiplicity of objective 

 appearances is thus the basis of our belief in realities 

 outside of thought.* In Chapter XII we shall have to take 

 up the judgment of sameness again. 



To show that the question of reality being extra-mental 

 or not is not likely to arise in the absence of repeated ex- 

 periences of the same, take the example of an altogether 

 unprecedented experience, such as a new taste in the throat. 

 Is it a subjective quality of feeling, or an objective quality 

 felt ? You do not even ask the question at this point. It 

 is simply that taste. But if a doctor hears you describe it, 

 and says : " Ha ! Now you know what hearthirn is," then 

 it becomes a quality already existent extra mentem tuam, 

 which you in turn have come upon and learned. The first 

 spaces, times, things, qualities, experienced by the child 

 probably appear, like the first heartburn, in this absolute 

 way, as simple beings, neither in nor out of thought. But 

 later, by having other thoughts than this present one, and 

 making repeated judgments of sameness among their ob- 

 jects, he corroborates in himself the notion of realities, 

 past and distant as well as present, which realities no one 

 single thought either possesses or engenders, but which all 

 may contemplate and know. This, as was stated in the last 

 chapter, is the psychological j)oint of \dew, the relatively 

 uncritical non-idealistic point of view of all natural science, 

 beyond which this book cannot go. A mind which has 

 become conscious of its own cognitive function, plays Avhat 

 we have called ' the psychologist ' upon itself. It not only 

 knows the things that appear before it ; it knows that it 



*If but one person sees an apparition we consider it bis private halluci- 

 nation. If more than one, we begin to think it may be a real external 

 presence. 



