an impartial hearing?

Thus, the idealist maintains that there is no existence save psychical
existence; that the material things about us are really mental things.
One of the forms taken by this doctrine is that alluded to above, that
things are permanent possibilities of sensation.

I think it can hardly be denied that this sounds out of harmony with
the common opinion of mankind. Men do not hesitate to distinguish
between minds and material things, nor do they believe that material
things exist only in minds. That dreams and hallucinations exist only
in minds they are very willing to admit; but they will not admit that
this is true of such things as real chairs and tables. And if we ask
them why they take such a position, they fall back upon what seems
given in experience.

Now, as the reader of the earlier chapters has seen, I think that the
plain man is more nearly right in his opinion touching the existence of
a world of non-mental things than is the idealistic philosopher. The
latter has seen a truth and misconceived it, thus losing some truth
that he had before he began to reflect. The former has not seen the
truth which has impressed the idealist, and he has held on to that
vague recognition that there are two orders of things given in our
experience, the physical and the mental, which seems to us so
unmistakable a fact until we fall into the hands of the philosophers.

But all this does not prove that we have a right simply to fall back
upon "common sense," and refuse to listen to the idealist. The
deliverances of unreflective common sense are vague in the extreme; and
though it may seem to assure us that there is a world of things
non-mental, its account of that world is confused and incoherent. He
who must depend on common sense alone can find no answer to the
idealists; he refuses to follow them, but he cannot refute them. He is
reduced to dogmatic denial.

This is in itself an uncomfortable position. And when we add to this
the reflection that such a man loses the truth which the idealist
emphasizes, the truth that the external world of which we speak must
be, if we are to know it at all, a world revealed to our senses, a
world given in our experience, we see that he who stops his ears
remains in ignorance. The fact is that the man who has never weighed
the evidence that impresses the idealist is not able to see clearly
what is meant by that external world in which we all incline to put
suc