THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY. 301 



world wliicli lie has made liis special study. Similarly, a 

 rare thing may be deemed more real than a jDermanent 

 thing if it be more widely related to other permanent 

 things. All the occasional crucial observations of science 

 are examples of this. A rare experience, too, is likely ta 

 be judged more real than a permanent one, if it be more in- 

 teresting and exciting. Such is the sight of Saturn through 

 a telescope ; such are the occasional insights and illumi- 

 nations which Ui3set our habitual ways of thought. 



But no mere floating conception, no mere disconnected 

 rarity, ever displaces vivid things or permanent things from 

 our belief. A conception, to prevail, must terminate in the 

 world of orderly sensible experience. A rare phenomenon, 

 to displace frequent ones, must belong with others more 

 frequent still. The history of science is strewn with wrecks 

 and ruins of theory — essences and principles, fluids and 

 forces — once fondly clung to, but found to hang together 

 with no facts of sense. And exceptional phenomena solicit 

 our belief in vain until such time as we chance to conceive 

 them as of kinds already admitted to exist. What science 

 means by ' verification ' is no more than this, that no object 

 of conception shall be believed which sooner or later has 

 not some permanent and vivid object of sensation for its 

 term. Compare Avhat was said on pages 3-7, above. 



Sensible objects are thus either our realities or the tests of our 

 realities. Conceived objects must show sensible effects or else be 

 disbelieved. And the effects, even though reduced to relative 

 unreality when their causes come to view (as heat, which 

 molecular vibrations make unreal), are yet the things on 

 which our knowledge of the causes rests. Strange mutual 

 dependence this, in which the appearance needs the reality 

 in order to exist, but the reality needs the appearance in 

 order to be known ! 



Sensible vividness or pungency is then the vital factor in 

 reality ivhen once the confict between objects, and the connecting 

 of them together in the mind, has begun. No object which 

 neither possesses this vividness in its own right nor is able 

 to borrow it from anything else has a chance of making 

 headway against vivid rivals, or of rousing in us that re- 

 action in which belief consists. On the vivid objects we 



