WHAT IS REALITY?
THE critics of Idealism, so numerous at the present time, seem to me more ready to uphold against the claims of thought the superior dignity of the Real, than to explain what they mean by that very ambiguous term. Our "Realists" nowadays are too cautious, or too polite, to speak about "the Vulgar"; I am compelled to think, however, that like their predecessors of last century, the Scottish Common-Sense School, they are playing off the vulgar against the philosophers. Nevertheless, I believe that the vulgar are being deceived by words, and that not "Realism" but "Idealism" corresponds to what the plain man really holds, if he can only be induced to go behind the deceptive forms of ordinary speech and think the matter thoroughly out. This may seem a very rash statement, and I must endeavor to prove it. What, then, does "real" mean?
I. There is, first of all, a sense in which every sensation or feeling or idea may be described as "real," if it actually occurs as a psychical event in the experience of any one. In this sense — it is a sense rather in favor with some Realist philosophers than with the plain man — the real is whatever is truly in any one's experience and is not falsely alleged to be so. If a person really, i.e. truly, sees "blue devils," they are real to him at the time he sees them, although they become unreal to him when he recovers health, and although throughout they are unreal to other persons. So, too, one's dreams, however absurd they may be, are real to one at the time — more or less. But how do we distinguish dreams from reality? Is it not by the test of coherence or persistence in our experience? If one's dream-experience in any one dream were to be perfectly coherent with itself, and if the events of one dream were always to follow in an intelligible sequence on the events of the preceding
