universal opinion, the dictum of common
sense and of science? When we look into his reasonings, we find that
he is influenced by the error discussed at length in the last
section--he has confused the phenomena of the two orders of experience.

I have said that, when we concern ourselves with the objective order,
we abstract or should abstract, from the relations which things bear to
our senses. We account for phenomena by referring to other phenomena
which we have reason to accept as their physical conditions or causes.
We do not consider that a physical cause is effective only while we
perceive it. When we come back to this notion of our perceiving a
thing or not perceiving it, we have left the objective order and passed
over to the subjective. We have left the consideration of "things" and
have turned to sensations.

There is no reason why we should do this. The physical order is an
independent order, as we have seen. The man of science, when he is
endeavoring to discover whether some thing or quality of a thing really
existed at some time in the past, is not in the least concerned to
establish the fact that some one saw it. No one ever saw the primitive
fire-mist from which, as we are told, the world came into being. But
the scientist cares little for that. He is concerned only to prove
that the phenomena he is investigating really have a place in the
objective order. If he decides that they have, he is satisfied; he has
proved something to exist. _To belong to the objective order is to
exist as a physical thing or quality_.

When the plain man and the man of science maintain that a physical
thing exists, they use the word in precisely the same sense. The
meaning they give to it is the proper meaning of the word. It is
justified by immemorial usage, and it marks a real distinction. Shall
we allow the philosopher to tell us that we must not use it in this
sense, but must say that only sensations and ideas exist? Surely not.
This would mean that we permit him to obliterate for us the distinction
between the external world and what is mental.

But is it right to use the word "experience" to indicate the phenomena
which have a place in the objective order? Can an experience be
anything but mental?

There can be no doubt that the suggestions of the word are
unfortunate--it has what we may call a subjective flavor. It suggests
that, after all, the things we perceive are sensations or percepts, and
mu