real; i.e. it is unimportant, it is not connected with what is permanent and persistent in our experience, it is not such as the sane or healthy man would feel.[1] That is to say, so far as the meaning of reality is concerned, pleasures and pains are real or unreal just as thoughts are subjectively real if they are actually experienced by any one, objectively real if they fit in with the rest of experience, i.e. if they belong to a coherent and intelligible system of thought-relations. Thinking is, therefore, the test of objective reality.
Such a sentence seems far away from the plain man's mode of expression, and I fancy the objection would be made here that I am ignoring an important distinction: that which is in space is real in a sense in which that which does not occupy space is not. Real things, it will be said, are different from ideas.
First of all, let us observe that this statement about reality is quite inconsistent with that just noticed about the superior reality of feelings. Feelings are not in space : and yet, as we have just seen, feelings are very real. It is true that sensations and feelings imply a physiological process that must take place in space and a body that must be in space. But in exactly the same sense thoughts imply a brain which is extended, and they also imply a society of human beings living and moving in space. Thus the distinction between sensations and thoughts is not parallel to the distinction between what is in space and what is not in space.
Clearly, however, this notion of filling space is a notion very commonly attached to the real. Let us see what it implies. The sensation of resistance to muscular movement gives us probably our earliest notion of reality — notion, I mean, as distinct from mere feeling. Resistance is offered by one part of our body to another, and yet both feel: so our body as both resisting and feeling is specially real to us. What does not resist, or resists only in a way not easily recognized, is not thought to be real. Thus air seems to be emptiness — empty
- ↑ The fifth meaning of Reality, the ethical meaning, comes in also, however, in reference to pleasure and pain.
