arousing liis social sentiments, by bodily acts, the practical man preserves himself from fantastical speculation. When better-trained thinkers call the belief in an external reality “a natural conviction, to be retained until we are compelled to abandon it,” or “a convenient working hypothesis, to be received on the testimony of consciousness, testimony assumed to be trustworthy until the opposite is proven,” what are these but similar practical considerations, appeals to the will? Concerning data of immediate consciousness such remarks would be wholly out of place. That I see a certain color at this moment is not a “convenient working hypothesis.” Is consciousness merely a “presumably trustworthy witness” when it testifies to the pangs of toothache? Nobody could balance evidence as to the reality of his sensation quâ sensation when consciousness is filled with the sound of a street-organ. Sound, color, pang, these are data, not merely things believed in. But the external world — that is actively accepted as being symbolized or indicated by the present consciousness, not as being given in the present consciousness.
In short, the popular assertion of an external world, being an assertion of something beyond the data of consciousness, must begin in an activity of judgment that does more than merely reduce present data to order. Such an assertion must be an active construction of non-data. We do not receive in our senses, but we posit through our judgment, whatever external world there may for us be. If there is really a deeper basis for this postulate of ours, still, at the outset, it is just a postulate.
