have ceased to be sensible—for example, that the hardness of a visible body, which has been discovered by touch, continues when the body is no longer touched—may be replaced by the statement that the effects of sensible objects persist, i.e. that what happens now can only be accounted for, in many cases, by taking account of what happened at an earlier time. Everything that one man, by his own personal experience, can verify in the account of the world given by common sense and physics, will be explicable by some such means, since verification consists merely in the occurrence of an expected sense-datum. But what depends upon testimony, whether heard or read, cannot be explained in this way, since testimony depends upon the existence of minds other than our own, and thus requires a knowledge of something not given in sense. But before examining the question of our knowledge of other minds, let us return to the question of the thing-in-itself, namely, to the theory that what exists at times when we are not perceiving a given sensible object is something quite unlike that object, something which, together with us and our sense-organs, causes our sensations, but is never itself given in sensation.
The thing-in-itself, when we start from common-sense assumptions, is a fairly natural outcome of the difficulties due to the changing appearances of what is supposed to be one object. It is supposed that the table (for example) causes our sense-data of sight and touch, but must, since these are altered by the point of view and the intervening medium, be quite different from the sense-data to which it gives rise. There is, in this theory, a tendency to a confusion from which it derives some of its plausibility, namely, the confusion between a sensation as a psychical occurrence and its object. A patch of colour, even if it
