[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.
{ 37} It may be asked, “Why should not a man form for himself a system which interprets his own perception, but is discrepant from the system of every one else? Should we in that case count him as awake?” Yes, he would be awake, but he would be mad. Suppose, being a common man, he interprets all his perceptions into a system which makes him out to be King of England; in such a case he cannot be set down as dreaming, because he is alleging a connection which goes beyond his present perception, and has, ostensibly, been propounded as an interpretation of it into a systematic order of things. He has in short _a_ world, but he has broken away from _the_ world, and therefore we pronounce him mad. A completely new vision of life may cause a man to be thought mad. [1]
[1] See Browning’s _Epistle of Karshish_.
The whole world, then, of our waking [1] consciousness may be treated as a single connected predicate affirmed as an enlargement of present perception. All that we take to be real is by the mere fact of being so taken, brought within an affirmative judgment.
[1] I do not mean to say that judgment and consciousness of a world can be wholly absent in dreams, and often no doubt they are distinctly present. But in those dreams, in my own experience the normal ones, which leave behind a mere impression that unrecognisable images have passed before the mind, judgment and the sense of reality must surely have all but disappeared. I am inclined to think that dreams are very much rationalised in recollection and description.