build round this centre. My body, taken in one with my present feelings and with the context which in space and time I can connect with this basis, is regarded by me as actual fact while all else is unreal. Thus my dreams are facts so far as they take their place as events in the real series, while the contents of my dreams are not real since they cannot so be ordered. The real world on this view is a group and series of actual events, and the test in the end is continuous connexion with my felt waking body. This is the doctrine which consciously or unconsciously underlies our common view as to the actual world. And it is this doctrine, I think, which usually is asserted or implied when the existence of mere floating ideas seems plausible.
I do not purpose here to discuss formally the truth and consistency of this view of reality's limits.[1] The doctrine is in trouble at once with regard to the actual existence of past and future. It fails wholly to explain the position given to the sphere of general and of abstract ideas. And to say that, when confronted with the facts of the spiritual world, with art and science, morality and religion, it proves inadequate, is to use a weak expression. The truth is that no one except for certain purposes really believes in such a view, and that no one for other purposes can fail, however unawares, to reject it. And, without pausing to consider any possible attempts at defence, I will proceed to offer another view which seems at least more in accordance with fact.
Every man's world, the whole world I mean in which his self also is included, is one, and it comes to his mind as one whole. It necessarily does so even when he maintains that it truly is but plural. But this unity is perhaps for most men no more than an underlying felt whole. There is, we may say, an implicit sense rather than an explicit object, but none the less the unity is experienced as real. On the other hand above this felt totality there is for the average man an indefinite number of worlds, worlds all more or less real but all, so far as appears, more or less independent. There are the facts perceived by the outer senses, and there is the inner realm of ideas and intimate feelings and passing moods. These regions more or less may correspond, but they do not correspond wholly. Then there is my present actual world, and the ambiguous existence of what has been and is about to be. There are the worlds of duty and of religious truth, which on the one side penetrate and on the other side trans-
- ↑ The foundation of this view is exposed in the second part of the present paper.
