THE PERCEPTION' OF REALITY. 305 



Zilge^ — and yet go on worsliippiug it all the same. Tlie 

 opinion so stoutly professed by many, tliat language is es- 

 sential to thought, seems to have this much of truth in it, 

 that all our inward images tend invincibly to attach them- 

 selves to something sensible, so as to gain in corporeity and 

 life. Words serve this purpose, gestures serve it, stones, 

 straws, chalk-marks, anything will do. As soon as anyone 

 of these things stands for the idea, the latter seems to be 

 more real. Some persons, the present writer among the 

 number, can hardly lecture without a black-board : the ab- 

 stract conceptions must be symbolized by letters, squares 

 or circles, and the relations between them by lines. All 

 this symbolism, linguistic, graphic, and dramatic, has other 

 uses too, for it abridges thought and fixes terms. But one 

 of its uses is surely to rouse the believing reaction and give 

 to the ideas a more living reality. As, when we are told a 

 story, and shown the very knife that did the murder, the 

 very ring whose hiding-place the clairvoyant revealed, the 

 whole tiling passes from fairy -land to mother-earth, so here 

 we believe all the more, if only we see that ' the bricks are 

 alive to tell the tale.' 



So much for the prerogative position of sensations in 

 regard to our belief. But among the sensations themselves 

 all are not deemed equally real. The more practicalh'- 

 important ones, the more permanent ones, and the more 

 aesthetically apprehensible ones are selected from the mass, 

 to be believed in most of all ; the others are degraded to 

 the position of mere signs aud suggestions of these. This 

 fact has already been adverted to in former chapters,* 

 Che real color of a thing is that one color-sensation which 

 it gives us when most favorabl}- lighted for vision. So 

 of its real size, its real shape, etc. — these are but optical 

 sensations selected out of thousands of others, because 

 they have aesthetic characteristics which appeal to our 

 convenience or delight. But I will not repeat what I have 

 already written about this matter, but pass on to our 

 treatment of tactile and muscular sensations, as ' primary 



* See Vol. I. pp. 285-6; Vol II. pp. 237 ff. 



