Yet with all its defects Agnosticism still enshrines one piece of truth which the metaphysician is peculiarly prone to forget. Of all men the metaphysician, just because his special interest is to know something final and certain about Reality, is the most apt to exaggerate the amount of his certain knowledge. It is well to be reminded that the certainty with which we may say that Reality is experience is compatible with a very imperfect and limited theoretical insight into experience itself. In actual life this is a far from unfamiliar fact; the literature of common sense is full of observations to the effect that we never really know our own hearts, that the most difficult task of the sage is to understand himself, and so forth,—complaints which all turn on the point that even our own limited direct experience of our own meanings and purposes goes far beyond what we can at any moment express in the form of reflective knowledge. Yet it is easy, when we come to deal in Metaphysics with the nature of ultimate Reality, to forget this, and to suppose that the certainty with which we can say that the ultimately Real is an experience justifies us in wholesale dogmatising about the special character of that experience. As a protest against such exaggerated estimates of the extent of our theoretical knowledge of the nature of Reality, Agnosticism thus contains a germ of genuine and important truth, and arises from a justifiable reaction against the undue emphasising of the merely intellectual side of our experience, of which we have already seen, and shall hereafter still more fully see, ground to complain as a besetting weakness of the metaphysically minded. (2) _Dogmatic Realism_, that is, Realism with admittedly knowable independent “reals,” is a much more workable doctrine, and in one of its forms, that of the so-called “naïve realism” which supposes the world of experienced things with all its perceived qualities to exist independently of any relation to an experiencing subject in precisely the same form in which we experience it, fairly represents the ordinary views of unphilosophical “common-sense” men. Nothing seems more obvious to “common sense” than that my perception of a thing does not bring it out of nothing into existence, and again does not create for it new qualities which it had not before. It is because the thing is already there, and has already such and such a nature, says “common sense,” that I perceive it as I do. Therefore the whole world of perceived things must exist independently in the same form in which they are perceived, as a condition of my perception of them.