To the question whether a thing exists when I am not looking at it, John
Stuart Mill replies, in effect, that as often as I look at it I shall
see it; that if I were looking I should see it. This is true enough; but
it is no answer to the question. When further pressed, Mill further
replies that, if things do not exist when we do not look, we should
nevertheless necessarily be deluded by the association of ideas into
imagining that they do exist when not looked at. Here, again, it is
perfectly true that, if things are not real, it is a delusion to imagine
they are. But that is no answer to the question. It is, in fact, a
question which the subjective idealist cannot answer. To say "No! Things
out of consciousness are non-existent," is to say that effects of which
the causes are unobserved are effects produced by non-existent causes.
To say "Yes" is to admit that things can exist out of consciousness as
well as in, which is what subjective idealism is there to deny.
We submit, then, that the analysis of experience which subjective
idealism makes is not an exhaustive analysis; and that, when the man of
common sense says that in looking at anything he is aware both of his
sensations of sight and of something more, he is stating the actual
facts as they are given in experience to all of us.
We apprehend a thing as being both our sensations and something more.
When the idealist says that the latter half of this apprehension is a
misapprehension, he rejects an observed fact of experience, not because
he does not find it in his experience, but because it seems to him
impossible that it should be there. He argues that to say we can be
conscious of what is not in our consciousness is to say that we can be
conscious of something of which we are unconscious--a patent nonsense.
He might admit, for the sake of argument, that possibly a thing could
exist both in consciousness and out, and even that we might know that it
so existed. But he cannot admit that a man is conscious of what he is
not conscious of.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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