The entering wedge for this more concrete
way of understanding the dualism was fashioned
by Locke when he made the word 'idea'
stand indifferently for thing and thought, and
by Berkeley when he said that what common
sense means by realities is exactly what the
philosopher means by ideas. Neither Locke
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nor Berkeley thought his truth out into perfect
clearness, but it seems to me that the conception
I am defending does little more than consistently
carry out the 'pragmatic' method
which they were the first to use.
If the reader will take his own experiences,
he will see what I mean. Let him begin with a
perceptual experience, the 'presentation,' so
called, of a physical object, his actual field of
vision, the room he sits in, with the book he is
reading as its centre; and let him for the present
treat this complex object in the common-
sense way as being 'really' what it seems to be,
namely, a collection of physical things cut out
from an environing world of other physical
things with which these physical things have
actual or potential relations. Now at the same
time it is just _those_self-same_things_ which his
mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy
of perception from Democritus's time
downwards has just been one long wrangle over
the paradox that what is evidently one reality
should be in two places at once, both in outer
space and in a person's mind.
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