At this stage, perhaps, Common Sense steps in, and, shaking his head, says, with characteristic bluntness, "Nonsense; you'll never persuade me that the things I see and feel around me are nothing but fictions of my own mind. I don't construct them, as you call it; there they are for me to see and feel and taste if I will." Now, Common Sense is a sturdy, hard-headed individual, with whom I desire to keep on friendly terms. And I therefore hasten to explain that I most fully agree with every word that he says. The orange that I see before me is not a mere fiction of my mind. I can, if I will, take it up, feel it, smell it, and taste it. If it will satisfy Common Sense, I will say that it is the idea of the orange that I construct. Only I think that Common Sense, who has a horror of roundabout and indirect statements, will not like my saying, "I am receiving certain visual sensations related in certain ways, which lead me to construct an idea of an orange." He will prefer my saying simply, "I see an orange." Since what he wants me to call our ideas of things answer point for point to the things as they actually exist for us human-folk, it is not only more satisfactory but more correct to merge the two in one, and speak directly and simply of the object. The object is a thing I construct. That it is real may be proved by submitting it to the test of all the senses that I have. And what do I mean by "real"? I mean that what it is for me it is also for you and any other normally constituted human being. This is, in truth, the only common-sense criterion of objective reality. Some people are colour-blind, and tell us that a rose is not red, but green. We reply that it is really red, but that, through a defect of sight, they cannot distinguish its redness. Here we take the normal human being as a standard for objective reality. For him the rose is red. And this is the only practical criterion that we have. This, however, does not satisfy some people, who think that the objects around them have the same reality, independent of man, that they have for us human-folk. Annihilate, they say, every human being--nay, all life--and the objects will remain as they are, and retain the same reality. Yes, the same reality; which means that if just one fortunate fellow escaped annihilation, he would find them all just as they were. And this nobody doubts. Nevertheless, it is (to me, at least) inconceivable that things independently of us are what they appear to us. Think of what we learnt about the sensations. They all arose in stimulations of the end-organs of special sense. Thence the explosive waves of change passed inwards to the brain, and somewhere therein gave rise to mental products. These mental products, the accompaniments of nerve-changes, can in no sense be like the outside something which gave rise to them. They are symbols of that outside something. And it is these symbols that we build up into objects.