, we give the preference to that. Thus we
look with the naked eye at a moving speck on the table before us, and
we are unable to distinguish its parts. We place a microscope over the
speck and perceive an insect with all its members. The second
experience is the more unusual one, but would not every one say: Now we
perceive the thing _as it is_?

21. ULTIMATE REAL THINGS.--Let us turn away from the senses of the word
"real," which recognize one color or taste or odor as more real than
another, and come back to the real world of things presented in
sensations of touch. All other classes of sensations may be regarded
as related to this as the series of visual experiences above mentioned
was related to the one tree which was spoken of as revealed in them
all, the touch tree of which they gave information.

Can we say that this world is always to be regarded as reality and
never as appearance? We have already seen (section 8) that science
does not regard as anything more than appearance the real things which
seem to be directly presented in our experience.

This pen that I hold in my hand seems, as I pass my fingers over it, to
be continuously extended. It does not appear to present an alternation
of filled spaces and empty spaces. I am told that it is composed of
molecules in rapid motion and at considerable distances from one
another. I am further told that each molecule is composed of atoms,
and is, in its turn, not a continuous thing, but, so to speak, a group
of little things.

If I accept this doctrine, as it seems I must, am I not forced to
conclude that the reality which is given in my experience, the reality
with which I have contrasted appearances and to which I have referred
them, is, after all, itself only an appearance? The touch things which
I have hitherto regarded as the real things that make up the external
world, the touch things for which all my visual experiences have served
as signs, are, then, not themselves real external things, but only the
appearances under which real external things, themselves imperceptible,
manifest themselves to me.

It seems, then, that I do not directly perceive any real thing, or, at
least, anything that can be regarded as more than an appearance. What,
then, is the external world? What are things really like? Can we give
any true account of them, or are we forced to say with the skeptics
that we only know how things seem to us, and must abandon the attempt