Thus we see how continuous is the mental construction of reality. From our unreflective education in seeing, hearing, and touching, to the explicit judgment of the trained observer, which in its turn passes readily into inference, there is no definite break. Once the idea of reality, or of a world, is applied in practice (I do not say reflectively grasped), there is no further difficulty in principle throughout the whole process of its construction.
We may then sum up so far: our knowledge, or our world in knowledge, exists for us as a judgment, that is, as an affirmation in which our present perception is amplified by an ideal interpretation which is identified with it. This interpretation or enlargement claims necessity or universality, and is therefore objective as our world, i.e. is what we are obliged to think, and what we are all obliged to think. The whole system in process of construction, viz. our present perception as extended by interpretation, is what we mean by reality, only with a reservation in favour of forms of experience which are not intellectual at all. Every judgment then affirms something to be real, and therefore affirms reality to be defined, in part, by that something. Knowledge exists in the form of affirmations about reality. And our world as existing for us in the medium of knowledge consists, for us, of a standing affirmation about reality.
{33} Continuous affirmation of waking consciousness
4. This standing affirmation about reality may be described in other words as “the continuous affirmative judgment of the waking consciousness.” In the common logic-books you will find judgment treated only as the “proposition,” that is, as an assertion made in language. That is a very convenient way of treating the judgment, and is not false, if you remember that the proposition, that is, the assertory sentence, is rather a translation of the judgment than the judgment itself. But the judgment expressed in a proposition is always some one definite assertion, with a limited subject and predicate. We shall speak of the judgment in this sense—the usual sense—later. But to-day I want to describe the judgment in a more extended sense, that is, as co-extensive with the waking human consciousness, so far as aware of a world.
If Judgment consists in the extension of our perceptions by an interpretation considered as equally real with their content, it clearly is not confined to the particular facts and truths which from time to time we utter in language. And more than this, everything that we do definitely utter, implies a great deal which is not definitely uttered. If I say, “I have to catch the train at Sloane Square to go down to Essex Hall,” I only mention the reality of one train, one square, and one building. But my assertion shades off into innumerable facts, the equal reality of which as elements in my world is necessary to make this judgment intelligible and true. It implies the real existence of the underground railway, which implies that of London, and therefore that of the surface of our globe in a certain definite order, and of the civilised world. It implies the reality of this building and of the meetings which we hold in it, of the University {34} Extension system, and of my own life and habits as enabling me to take part in the work of that system. Only a part of this is in the focus of my attention as I judge; but the whole is a continuous context, the parts of which are inseparable; and although I do not affirm the whole of it in so many words, when I say that I am coming down here by train this evening, yet if any part of it was not affirmed the rest would, so to speak, fall to pieces, i.e. would lose relations in the absence of which its meaning would be destroyed. Other detached parts of one’s life and knowledge may seem to be separable from the content of such a judgment; but on looking closely we see that this is not the case. So long as we are awake, our whole world is conceived as real, and forms for us a single immense affirmation, which hangs from present perception, and shares its constraining power. My present perception is the illuminated spot, and shades off gradually into the rest which forms the background, receiving from this background its organised systematic individuality, while impressing upon it a relation to its own sensuous presentness. We have only to reflect, in order to illustrate this connection, on the way in which the idea of London forms a determining background for the present perception of this room, while on the other hand it is perceived by us as real in our presentation of this room.
And indeed the simplest example of what I am pointing out is the arrangement of objects and places in space. The visual picture which each of us forms of this room is certainly an affirmative judgment. It is a judgment because it consists of ideas affirmed as true of reality. As we look round, all the distances of the objects and the walls from {35} each other, and their shapes and position, seem to be imprinted on our minds without an effort. But really they are conclusions from long education in the art of seeing and from the experience of the other senses. They are an enlargement or interpretation of sense-perception, taken as real, i.e. as forming a system which is one with the content of sense-perception, and touches us through sense-perception, and therefore they exist for us in the form of Judgment. And, as I described before, our whole world, both of things in space and of our own history and circumstances, is also affirmed as the background implied in this picture. That is to say, it is all connected together, it is all taken as equally real, and it is all vouched for by its connection with what is given to us in perception. What do we mean by saying that the Antipodes are real, and implied in my perception of this room? We mean that they are an element, necessary to educated thought, in the same system with which I am in contact at this moment by sight, touch, and hearing, the system of reality. And though I may not have explicitly thoughts of them since entering the room till now, yet, if they were no part of my affirmed system of ideas, my perception of anything in space would be quite different from what it is.
This sense of necessary connection is confined, I think, to our waking consciousness. Of course there are degrees between waking and dreaming; but I should be inclined to set up the presence or absence of judgment as a very fair test of those degrees. We say that a man is awake in as far as he is aware (i) of a reality which is not his mere course of consciousness, and (ii.) of the same reality of which other {36} people are aware; i.e. in as far as he identifies his present perception with a reality, and that the real reality. It is said that surprise, i.e. the sense of conflict between expectation and the reality, is absent In dreams, and in a very remarkable passage Aeschylus identifies the life of the savage in his (imaginary) primitive state with a dream-life, considered as a life of sensuous presentation, in which the interpretative judgment of perception was absent. With extraordinary profoundness, in portraying this all but animal existence, he strikes out all those relations to the objective world by which man forms for himself a system that goes beyond the present, so as to leave the stream of presentation without any background of organised reality. [1]
[1] I quote from Mrs. Browning’s Translation of the Prometheus Bound, which seems close enough for the present purpose.
“And let me tell you, not as taunting men,
But teaching you the intention of my gifts,
How first, beholding, they beheld in vain.
And hearing, heard not, but, like shapes in dreams,
Mixed all things wildly down the tedious time,
Nor knew to build a house against the sun
With wicketed sides, nor any woodwork knew,
But lived, like silly ants, beneath the ground,
In hollow caves unsunned. There came to them
No steadfast sign of winter, nor of spring
Flower-perfumed, nor of summer full of fruit.
But blindly and lawlessly they did all things,
Until I taught them how the stars do rise
And set in mystery, and devised for them
Number, the inducer of philosophies.
The synthesis of letters, and besides,
The artificer of all things, Memory,
That sweet muse-mother.” Pr., v. 445, ff.
The expression “seeing saw not, and hearing heard not” appears to suggest the contrast of presentation and objective perception.