Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/475

ON FLOATING IDEAS AND THE IMAGINAEY. 461 stroke you have removed the characters of both imaginary and real. And if such a mere felt quality seems but a pre- carious foundation for our edifice, that is precisely the con- clusion which I desire to suggest. For what I call my real world is something other than Reality. It is a construction, required for certain ends and true within limits, but beyond those limits more or less precarious, negligible, and in the end invalid. 1 The imaginary then is made by exclusion from my real world. It rests in the last resort on a felt difference from a felt unique quality, and this, I apprehend, is a difference in content. Such a result, I admit, entails difficulties which I do not here discuss. But, if we reject it, we seem forced to conclusions which to my mind are far less tolerable. For I cannot see how things or orders of things are to be distinct, if they are not different, or what in the end can be meant by a relation which is merely external. The difference between the real and imaginary thus rests in the end upon content. So far as you abstract from the difference, the content of both worlds is obviously the same. For many purposes the abstraction is permissible and useful, but it is not everywhere valid. And thus the doctrine of the identity in content between real and imaginary has but partial truth. When you take the instance of the Universe or again of my real self, the doctrine proves inapplicable or vicious. We have thus been led once more to the main theme of this paper. The difference between my world of fact and my other worlds is important and necessary, but the exag- gerated value we often tend to attach to it is really illusory. Its pretensions are in practice refuted incessantly by ex- 1 It is useless to insist that my real world is real because it is the world where we all meet really through the real connexions of our real bodies. For, as was remarked above, in my dreams my own dream-body pos- sesses its world of things and of other persons, and this order of things, while I dream, is real to myself. Nay an indefinite number of persons might, for all we know, dream a world of identical content, in which each with a difference occupied his proper place. And if you ask for the criterion by which to decide between my dreamt and my waking worlds, something more is required than a mere arbitrary choice. You are led in the end to find that the superiority of my waking world lies in its character, in the greater order and system which it possesses and effects. But, with this, the hard division has turned into a question of degree, and this question once raised will tend to carry us stUl further. I may remark in passing that the real world is by some writers defined BO exclusively, that that which is perceptible but to one person becomes unreal. But obviously any man might under individual conditions have an experience which would not be shared by others, and which would yet belong to the order of events in the real world of fact. 31