Now the practical burden of such understanding, if you take the trouble
to analyse it, will turn out to be what the sceptic says it is:
assurance of eventual sensations. But as these sensations, in memory and
expectation, are numerous and indefinitely variable, you are not able to
hold them clearly before the mind; indeed, the realisation of all the
potentialities which you vaguely feel to lie in the future is a task
absolutely beyond imagination. Yet your present impressions, dependent
as they are on your chance attitude and disposition and on a thousand
trivial accidents, are far from representing adequately all that might
be discovered or that is actually known about the object before you.
This object, then, to your apprehension, is not identical with any of
the sensations that reveal it, nor is it exhausted by all these
sensations when they are added together; yet it contains nothing
assignable but what they might conceivably reveal. As it lies in your
fancy, then, this object, the reality, is a complex and elusive entity,
the sum at once and the residuum of all particular impressions which,
underlying the present one, have bequeathed to it their surviving
linkage in discourse and consequently endowed it with a large part of
its present character. With this hybrid object, sensuous in its
materials and ideal in its locus, each particular glimpse is compared,
and is recognised to be but a glimpse, an aspect which the object
presents to a particular observer. Here are two identifications. In the
first place various sensations and felt relations, which cannot be kept
distinct in the mind, fall together into one term of discourse,
represented by a sign, a word, or a more or less complete sensuous
image. In the second place the new perception is referred to that ideal
entity of which it is now called a manifestation and effect.

Such are the primary relations of reality and appearance. A reality is a
term of discourse based on a psychic complex of memories, associations,
and expectations, but constituted in its ideal independence by the
assertive energy of thought. An appearance is a passing sensation,
recognised as belonging to that group of which the object itself is the
ideal representative, and accordingly regarded as a manifestation of
that object.

Thus the notion of an independent and permanent world is an ideal term
used to mark and as it were to justify the cohesion in space and the
recurrence in time of recogni