But whatever may have been the view of the historical “common-sense school,” [1] the common-sense theory which we all make for ourselves involves a separation between the mind and reality. The objective world is the world as independent of mind, and independent of mind means existing and acting outside mind, exactly, or almost exactly, as it seems to exist and act before the mind.
[1] See Seth, _Scottish Philosophy_ (Blackwood, 1885).
Now this is an absolute _cul-de-sac_. If the objective is that which is outside perception, the objective is out of our reach, and the world of our perception can never be objective. This is the pass to which we are brought by taking { 11} common sense as the guide of theory and not as its material.
iii. There is no way out but by retracing our steps, and avoiding a false turn which we took in passing from common sense to common-sense theory. It was quite true that the world is unaffected by the withdrawal of my individual perception and consciousness (except in so far as I acted _qua_ bodily thing in the world); but it does not follow from this that _if_ it becomes the object of a consciousness in me, it can be so otherwise than as presented within that consciousness. We must distinguish between the idea that the objective is outside consciousness and therefore not in consciousness, and the idea that the objective can be in the individual consciousness, but identified with something beyond the individual consciousness. It may be that consciousness is capable of containing a world, not as a copy of a ready-made original, but as something which it makes for itself by a necessary process, and which refers beyond this finite and momentary consciousness.
According to these ideas, the objective is, shortly stated, whatever we are obliged to think. This, though it is _in_ our thought, is not considered merely _as_ our thought, or as a train of images or whole of presentation in our minds. That is an artificial point of view, the point of view of psychology, and we must carefully avoid starting from it. But knowledge refers beyond its mental self, and has no limitation in time or in kind except its own necessity. Thus, I am forced to think, by a certain context of ideas and perceptions, that there is now a fire burning in my study at home. This judgment is not barred by the fact that my mind, as a { 12} function attached to my body, is here three miles away. The thought is objective for me, so long as I am obliged to think it. My presence in or absence from the room where the fire is burning has no effect on the question, except as it furnishes me with evidence one way or the other. Not only absence in space is no obstacle, but succession in time is no obstacle. My thought, which _is_ here and now, refers confidently to what has happened in long intervals of time, if the necessity of consistency obliges it to do so. Thus if I go back to my room and find the fire out and the room very cold, I infer without hesitation to certain acts and events which are needed to explain this state of things. And interpretations or explanations of this kind make up my world, which is for me in my thought, but is presented as more than my thought, and cannot be a world at all unless it is more than in my thought. It is in as far as my thought constructs and presents a world which is more than my momentary psychical state, that my thought, and the world as presented to me in it, is objective. The world is not a set of my ideas, but it is a set of objects and relations of which I frame an idea, and the existence of which has no meaning for me except as presented in the idea which 1 frame. We are not to think of (i) Ideas, and (ii) Things which they represent; the ideas, taken as parts of a world, _are_ the things.