But precisely how much do these two considerations prove? All that is established by the first is the point on which we have already insisted, that it is not _my_ experience which constitutes Reality; and all that is established by the second, that experience, as we have already repeatedly seen, is not merely cognitive. But the admission of both these positions brings us not one step nearer the conclusion which the realist draws from them, that real existence is independent of all experience. Because it is easy to show that the reality of a thing does not depend on its being explicitly recognised by any one finite percipient or any aggregate of finite percipients, and again, that there is more in any experience of finite percipients than those percipients know, the realist thinks he may infer that there are realities which would still be real though they entered into no experience at all. But there is really no logical connection whatever between the premisses of this inference and the conclusion which is drawn from them. This may be made clearer by a couple of examples. Take, to begin with, the case of the mental life of my fellow human beings. And, to state the case in the form in which it appears most favourable to the realist conclusion, let us imagine an Alexander Selkirk stranded on a barren rock in the midst of the ocean. The hopes and fears of our Selkirk are independent of my knowledge of them just as completely and in just the same sense in which the existence and conformation of the rock on which he is stranded are so. I and all other inhabitants of the earth may be just as ignorant of Selkirk’s existence and of what is passing in his mind as we are of the existence and geological structure of his rock. And again, what Selkirk explicitly cognises of his own inner life may bear as small a proportion to the whole as what he explicitly cognises of the properties of his rock to the whole nature of the rock. Yet all this in no wise shows that Selkirk’s hopes and fears and the rest of his mental life are not experience or have a reality “independent of experience.” Hopes and fears which are not experience, not psychical matter of fact, would indeed be a contradiction in set terms. And what the argument fails to prove of Selkirk’s mental life, it fails, for the same reason, to prove of Selkirk’s rock.