Take next our knowledge of our own dreams. Dr. Watson has not, so far as I know, ever discussed dreams, but I imagine he would say something like this: In dreams, there are probably small laryngeal movements such as, if they were greater, would lead to speech; indeed, people do sometimes cry out in dreams. There may also be stimulations of the sense-organs, which produce unusual reactions owing to the peculiar physiological condition of the brain during sleep: but all these reactions must consist of small movements, which could theoretically be seen from outside, say by some elaboration of X-ray apparatus. This is all very well, but meantime it is hypothetical, and the dreamer himself knows his dreams without all this elaborate inference. Can we say that he really knows these hypothetical small bodily movements, although he thinks he knows something else? That would presumably be Dr. Watson’s position, and it must be admitted that, with a definition of “knowledge” such as we considered in Chapter VIII, such a view is not to be dismissed offhand as obviously impossible. Moreover, if we are to say the perception gives knowledge of the physical world, we shall have to admit that what we are perceiving may be quite different from what it seems to be. A table does not look like a vast number of electrons and protons, nor like trains of waves meeting and clashing. Yet this is the sort of thing a table is said to be by modern physicists. If, then, what seems to us to be just a table such as may be seen any day is really this odd sort of thing, it is possible that what seems to us to be a dream is really a number of movements in the brain. This again is all very well, but there is one point which it fails to explain, namely, what is meant by “seeming”. If a dream or a table “seems” to be one sort of thing while it is “really” another, we shall have to admit that it _really_ seems, and that what it seems to be has a reality of its own. Nay more, we only arrive at what it “really” is by an inference, valid or invalid, from what it seems to be. If we are wrong about the seeming, we must be doubly wrong about the reality, since the sole ground for asserting the table composed of electrons and protons is the table that we see, _i.e._ the “seeming” table. We must therefore treat “seeming” with respect.