Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/27

tion either of the thorough-going views will serve. It is only the eclectic view that is bound to beget superstition. Thus a complete physical realism, even if it claims to be materialism, is largely free from the vice inherent in the older doctrine of that name, that it discredits as unreal the most precious elements of the world. For our modern realist, whether right or wrong, the world is genuinely as it seems to be—bright, warm, responsive; not as even James Hinton said that science shows it to be—"dark, cold, and shaking like a jelly." An extraordinary confusion, to presuppose the operation of the sense-organs in observing the consequences of their own supposed absence! The terrible and sinister prejudice of materialism which here finds expression is, as we said, emphatically and necessarily repudiated by the doctrine before us. We are warned of this in definite language. "To such a conception," as that now promulgated, Professor Alexander observes, "we oppose our habitual notion of material things as being somehow