4 o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



there externally exist no Sun and no motion at all, he would hare 

 done what idealists do; and his arguments would have been equally- 

 powerless against the intuition of Common-Sense. But he does 

 nothing of the kind. He accepts the intuition of Common-Sense 

 respecting the reality of the Sun and the motion ; but replaces the 

 old interpretation of it by a new interpretation reconcilable with all 

 the facts. 



Just in the same way that, here, acceptance of the inexpugnable 

 element in the Common-Sense judgment by no means involves accept- 

 ance of the accompanying judgments, so, in the case of Crude 

 Realism, it does not follow that, while against the consciousness of an 

 objective reality the arguments of Anti-Realism are utterly futile, 

 they are therefore futile against the conceptions which Crude Realism 

 forms of the objective reality. If Anti-Realism can show that, grant- 

 ing an objective reality, the interpretation of Crude Realism contains 

 insuperable difficulties, the process is quite legitimate. And, its pri- 

 mordial intuition remaining unshaken, Realism may, on reconsidera- 

 tion, be enabled to frame a new conception which harmonizes with all 

 the facts. 



To show that there is not here the "mazy inconsistency" alleged, 

 let us take the case of sound as interpreted by Crude Realism, and as 

 reinterpreted by Transfigured Realism. Crude Realism assumes the 

 sound" present in consciousness to exist as such beyond consciousness. 

 Anti-Realism proves the inadmissibility of this assumption in sundry 

 ways (all of which, however, set out by talking of sounding bodies 

 beyond consciousness, just as Realism talks of them) ; and then Anti- 

 Realism concludes that we know of no existence save the sound as a 

 mode of consciousness : which conclusion and all kindred conclusions, 

 I contend, are vicious — first, because all the words used connote an 

 objective activity; second, because the arguments are impossible 

 without postulating at the outset an objective activity; and third, 

 because no one of the intuitions, out of which the arguments are built, 

 is of equal validity with the single intuition of Realism that an 

 objective activity exists. But, now, the Transfigured Realism which 

 Mr. Sidgwick thinks " has all the serious incongruity of an intense 

 metaphysical dream " neither affirms the untenable conception of 

 Crude Realism, nor, like Anti-Realism, draws unthinkable conclusions 

 by suicidal arguments ; but, accepting that which is essential in 

 Crude Realism, and admitting the difficulties which Anti-Realism 

 insists upon, reconciles matters by a reinterpret ation analogous to 

 that which an astronomer makes of the solar motion. Continuing all 

 along to recognize an objective activity which Crude Realism calls 

 sound, it shows that the sensation is produced by a succession of sepa- 

 rate impacts which, if made slowly, may be separately identified, and 

 which will, if progressively increased in rapidity, produce tones higher 

 and higher in pitch. It shows by other experiments that sounding 



