If either of them say, 'That candle or that horse, even when I don't see it, exists in the outer world,' he pushes into ' the outer world ,'
an object which may be incompatible with everything which he otherwise knows of that world.If so, he must take his choice of which to hold by, the present perceptions or the other knowledge of the world.If he holds to the other knowledge, the present perceptions are contradicted, so far as their relation to that world goes.Candle and horse, whatever they may be, are not existents in outward space.They are existents, of course; they are mental objects; mental objects have existence as mental objects.But they are situated in their own spaces, the space in which they severally appear, and neither of those spaces is the space in which the realities called 'the outer world' exist.
Take again the horse with wings.If I merely dream of a horse with wings, my horse interferes with nothing else and has not to be contradicted.That horse, its wings, and its place, are all equally real.That horse exists no other-wise than as winged, and is moreover really there, for that place exists no otherwise than as the place of that horse, and claims as yet no connection with the other places of the world.But if with this horse I make an inroad into the world otherwise known , and say, for example, 'That is my old mare Maggie, having grown a pair of wings where she stands in her stall,' the whole case is altered; for now the horse and place are identified with a horse and place otherwise known, and what is known of the latter objects is incompatible with what is perceived with the former.
'Maggie in her stall with wings! Never!' The wings are unreal, then, visionary.
I have dreamed a lie about Maggie in her stall.
The reader will recognize in these two cases the two sorts of judgment called in the logic-books existential and attributive respectively.
'The candle exists as an outer reality' is an existential, 'My Maggie has got a pair of wings' is an attributive, proposition; and it follows from what was first said that all propositions, whether attributive or existential, are believed through the very fact of being conceived, unless they clash with other propositions believed at the same time, by alarming that their terms are the same with the terms of these other propositions.
A dream-candle has existence, true enough; but not the same existence (existence for itself, namely, or extra mentem meam ) which the candles of waking perception have.A dream-horse has wings; but then neither horse nor wings are the same with any horses or wings known to memory.That we call at any moment think of the same thing which at any former moment we thought of is the ultimate law of our intellectual constitution.But when we now think of it incompatibly with our other ways of thinking it, then we must choose which way to stand by, for we cannot continue to think in two contradictory ways at once.The whole distinction of real and unreal, the whole psychology of belief, disbelief, and doubt, is thus grounded on two mental facts --
first, that we are liable to think differently of the same; and second, that when we have done so, we can choose which way of thinking to adhere to and which to disregard.
The subjects adhered to become real subjects, the attributes adhered to real attributes, the existence adhered to real existence; whilst the subjects disregarded become imaginary subjects, the attributes disregarded erroneous it attributes, and the existence disregarded an existence into men's land, in the limbo 'where footless fancies dwell.' The real things are, in Mr.Taine's terminology, the reductives of the things judged unreal.THE MANY WORLDS.
Habitually and practically we do not count these disregarded things as existents at all.For them V?victis is the law in the popular philosophy; they are not even treated as appearances; they are treated as if they were mere waste, equivalent to nothing at all.To the genuinely philosophic mind, however, they still have existence, though not the same existence, as the real things.As objects of fancy, as errors, as occupants of dreamland, etc., they are in their way as indefeasible parts of life, as undeniable features of the Universe, as the realities are in their way.The total world of which the philosophers must take account is thus composed of the realities plus the fancies and illusions.
Two sub-universes, at least, connected by relations which philosophy tries to ascertain! Really there are more than two sub-universes of which we take account, some of us of this one, and others of that.For there are various categories both of illusion and of reality, and alongside of the world of absolute error (i.e., error confined to single individuals)
but still within the world of absolute reality (i.e., reality believed by the complete philosopher) there is the world of collective error, there are the worlds of abstract reality, of relative or practical reality, of ideal relations, and there is the supernatural world.The popular mind conceives of all these sub-worlds more or less discontentedly; and when dealing with one of them, forgets for the time being its relations to the rest.The complete philosopher is he who seeks not only to assign to every given object of his thought its right place in one or other of these sub-worlds, but he also seeks to determine the relation of each sub-world to the others in the total world which is.
The most important sub-universes commonly discriminated from each other and recognized by most of us as existing, each with its own special and separate style of existence, are the following:
(1) The world of sense, or of physical 'things' as we instinctively apprehend them, with such qualities as heat, color, and sound, and such 'forces' as life, chemical affinity, gravity, electricity, all existing as such within or on the surface of the things.
