52. REALISM.--The plain man is a realist. That is to say, he believes in a world which is not to be identified with his own ideas or those of any other mind. At the same time, as we have seen (section 12), the distinction between the mind and the world is by no means clear to him. It is not difficult, by judicious questioning, to set his feet upon the slippery descent that shoots a man into idealism. The vague realism of the plain man may be called _Naive_ or _Unreflective Realism_. It has been called by some _Natural Realism_, but the latter term is an unfortunate one. It is, of course, natural for the unreflective man to be unreflective, but, on the other hand, it is also natural for the reflective man to be reflective. Besides, in dubbing any doctrine "natural," we are apt to assume that doctrines contrasted with it may properly be called "unnatural" or "artificial." It is an ancient rhetorical device, to obtain sympathy for a cause in which one may happen to be interested by giving it a taking name; but it is a device frowned upon by logic and by good sense. One kind of realism is, then, naive realism. It is the position from which we all set out, when we begin to reflect upon the system of things. It is the position to which some try to come back, when their reflections appear to be leading them into strange or unwelcome paths. We have seen how Thomas Reid (section 50) recoiled from the conclusions to which the reasonings of the philosophers had brought him, and tried to return to the position of the plain man. The attempt was a failure, and was necessarily a failure, for Reid tried to come back to the position of the plain man _and still be a philosopher_. He tried to live in a cloud and, nevertheless, to see clearly--a task not easy to accomplish. It should be remarked, however, that he tried, at least, to insist that we know the external world _directly_. We may divide realists into two broad classes, those who hold to this view, and those who maintain that we know it only indirectly and through our ideas. The plain man belongs, of course, to the first class, if it is just to speak of a man who says inconsistent things as being wholly in any one class. Certainly he is willing to assert that the ground upon which he stands and the staff in his hand are perceived by him directly.