whether the various realities
which we suppose ourselves to know depend upon the mind. Our natural
procedure is not to treat them simply as realities and to ask whether,
as realities, they involve a mind to know them, but to treat them as
realities of the particular kind to which they belong, and to consider
relation to the mind of some kind other than that of knowledge. We
should say, for instance, that a toothache or an emotion, as being a
feeling, presupposes a mind capable of feeling, whose feeling it is;
for if the mind be thought of as withdrawn, the pain or the feeling
must also be thought of as withdrawn. We should say that an act of
thinking presupposes a mind which thinks. We should, however,
naturally deny that an act of thinking or knowing, in order to be,
presupposes that it is known either by the thinker whose act it is, or
by any other mind. In other words, we should say that knowing
presupposes a mind, not as something which _knows_ the knowing, but
as something which _does_ the knowing. Again, we should naturally say
that the shape or the weight of a stone is _not_ dependent on the mind
which perceives the stone. The shape, we should say, would disappear
with the disappearance of the stone, but would not disappear with the
disappearance of the mind which perceives the stone. Again, we should
assert that the stone itself, so far from depending on the mind which
perceives it, has an independent being of its own. We might, of
course, find difficulty in deciding whether a reality of some
particular kind, e. g. a colour, is dependent on a mind. But, in any
case, we should think that the ground for decision lay in the special
character of the reality in question, and should not treat it merely
as a reality related to the mind as something known. We should ask,
for instance, whether a colour, as a colour, involves a mind which
sees, and not whether a colour, as a reality, involves its being
known. Our natural procedure, then, is to divide realities into two
classes, those which depend on a mind, and may therefore be called
mental, and those which do not, and to conclude that some realities
depend upon the mind, while others do not. We thereby ignore a
possible dependence of realities on their being known; for not only is
the dependence which we recognize of some other kind, e. g. in respect
of feeling or sentience, but if the dependence were in respect of
knowledge, we could not distinguish in respect of depen