At this point we must revert to a suggestion which presented itself
above in another connection, but which at the time could not be further
developed. This was, in a word, that there is often a feeling of
_obtrusiveness_ in our appreciation of the objectivity of the things
before us in ordinary sense-perception (or physical judgment) which is
not unlike the felt insistence of remorse and grief.[123] This feeling
is so conspicuous a feature of the state of consciousness in physical
judgment as frequently to serve the plain man as his last and
irrefragable evidence of the metaphysical independence of the material
world, and it is indeed a feature whose explanation does throw much
light upon the meaning of the consciousness of objectivity as a factor
within experience. Now, there is another common feeling--or, as we do
not scruple to call it, another emotion--which is perhaps quite as often
appealed to in this way; though, as we believe, never in quite the same
connection in any argument in which the two experiences are called upon
to do service to the same end. Material objects, we are told, are
_reliable_ and _stable_ as distinguished from the fleeting illusive
images of a dream--they have a "solidity" in virtue of which one can
"depend upon them," are "hard and fast" remaining faithfully where one
deposits them for future use or, if they change and disappear, doing so
in accordance with fixed laws which make the changes calculable in
advance. The material realm is the realm of "solid fact" in which one
can work with assurance that causes will infallibly produce their right
and proper effects, and to which one willingly returns from the
dream-world in which his adversary, the "idealist," would hold him
spellbound. We propose now briefly to consider these two modes of
apprehension of external physical reality in the light of the general
analysis of judgment given above--from which it will appear that they
are, psychologically, emotional expressions of what have been set forth
as the essential features of the judgment-situation, whether in its
physical, ethical, or economic forms. From this we shall argue that
there should actually be in the ethical and economic spheres similar, or
essentially identical, "emotions of reality," and we shall then proceed
to verify the hypothesis by pointing to those ethical and economic
experiences which answer the description.
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