The Problems of Philosophy | Page 4

room or shut our eyes, and that what we call
seeing the table does really give us reason for believing in something which persists even
when we are not seeing it. But he thinks that this something cannot be radically different
in nature from what we see, and cannot be independent of seeing altogether, though it
must be independent of our seeing. He is thus led to regard the 'real' table as an idea in
the mind of God. Such an idea has the required permanence and independence of
ourselves, without being--as matter would otherwise be--something quite unknowable, in
the sense that we can only infer it, and can never be directly and immediately aware of it.
Other philosophers since Berkeley have also held that, although the table does not depend
for its existence upon being seen by me, it does depend upon being seen (or otherwise
apprehended in sensation) by some mind--not necessarily the mind of God, but more
often the whole collective mind of the universe. This they hold, as Berkeley does, chiefly
because they think there can be nothing real--or at any rate nothing known to be real
except minds and their thoughts and feelings. We might state the argument by which they
support their view in some such way as this: 'Whatever can be thought of is an idea in the
mind of the person thinking of it; therefore nothing can be thought of except ideas in
minds; therefore anything else is inconceivable, and what is inconceivable cannot exist.'
Such an argument, in my opinion, is fallacious; and of course those who advance it do not
put it so shortly or so crudely. But whether valid or not, the argument has been very
widely advanced in one form or another; and very many philosophers, perhaps a majority,
have held that there is nothing real except minds and their ideas. Such philosophers are
called 'idealists'. When they come to explaining matter, they either say, like Berkeley,
that matter is really nothing but a collection of ideas, or they say, like Leibniz
(1646-1716), that what appears as matter is really a collection of more or less
rudimentary minds.
But these philosophers, though they deny matter as opposed to mind, nevertheless, in
another sense, admit matter. It will be remembered that we asked two questions; namely,
(1) Is there a real table at all? (2) If so, what sort of object can it be? Now both Berkeley
and Leibniz admit that there is a real table, but Berkeley says it is certain ideas in the
mind of God, and Leibniz says it is a colony of souls. Thus both of them answer our first
question in the affirmative, and only diverge from the views of ordinary mortals in their
answer to our second question. In fact, almost all philosophers seem to be agreed that
there is a real table: they almost all agree that, however much our sense-data--colour,
shape, smoothness, etc.--may depend upon us, yet their occurrence is a sign of something
existing independently of us, something differing, perhaps, completely from our
sense-data, and yet to be regarded as causing those sense-data whenever we are in a
suitable relation to the real table.

Now obviously this point in which the philosophers are agreed--the view that there is a
real table, whatever its nature may be--is vitally important, and it will be worth while to
consider what reasons there are for accepting this view before we go on to the further
question as to the nature of the real table. Our next chapter, therefore, will be concerned
with the reasons for supposing that there is a real table at all.
Before we go farther it will be well to consider for a moment what it is that we have
discovered so far. It has appeared that, if we take any common object of the sort that is
supposed to be known by the senses, what the senses immediately tell us is not the truth
about the object as it is apart from us, but only the truth about certain sense-data which,
so far as we can see, depend upon the relations between us and the object. Thus what we
directly see and feel is merely 'appearance', which we believe to be a sign of some
'reality' behind. But if the reality is not what appears, have we any means of knowing
whether there is any reality at all? And if so, have we any means of finding out what it is
like?
Such questions are bewildering, and it is difficult to know that even the strangest
hypotheses may not be true. Thus our familiar table, which has roused but the slightest
thoughts in us hitherto, has become a problem full of surprising possibilities. The one
thing we know about it is