the light of consciousness, to doubt the “testimony of consciousness.” Is not every such doubt doomed from the start to contradiction? What can guide the doubt concerning the “testimony of consciousness” except consciousness itself? Who can cross-question or refute this “witness” without appealing to the very witness in person?
But whether one calls it doubting or not, it seems certain that we have a right, as students devoted to reflection upon first principles, to ask, a little more precisely, what the “testimony” in question means, to what sort of independence it bears witness, and in what sense the testimony is supposed to be presented in or through consciousness. To ask such questions is to begin the course of reflection which leads to Idealism. In my original paper I treated these questions in a fashion necessarily very summary. Let us here examine some of them a little more closely, for the sake of later comprehending more clearly the implications of our own position. For, I repeat, the presuppositions of ordinary Realism have a close relation to those which Professor Howison opposes to my thesis.
There is, in everybody’s consciousness, the evidence of somewhat whose existence is independent of this consciousness itself. Here is the thesis. If we examine consciousness to find of what nature this evidence is, we meet with a well-known difference of opinion. Some thinkers teach, as Reid no doubt in the main meant to teach, that this evidence for the independent reality is simply “immediate.” That is, this evidence, in its direct character as mere feeling,
