has a perception of a white object. So much is taken for granted and is
unquestioned within that judgment. But there is another part of the
experience which is questioned, and which remains tentative up to the
conclusion of the act of judgment; that is the doubt as to whether the
perceived white object is bread or something else. Every live judgment,
every judgment as it normally occurs in the vital process of thought,
must have these phases. It is only when a judgment is taken out of its
context and reduced to a mere memorandum of past judgments that it fails
to reveal such parts. The man may, of course, go farther back. He may
wonder whether this is really white or not. But he falls back then on
something else which he takes unquestioningly--a "this" experience of
some sort or other.
So far we have considered the practical criterion of reality merely as
the one which is actually operative in everyday life, and as the one
suggested by our biological theory of the functions of living organisms.
It also offers a suggestion for the modified view of the nature of
reality for which we are in search. Our previous discussion brought out
incidentally a contradiction in the traditional theory of the nature of
reality which it will be worth while to consider further. In dealing
with the subject of the judgment, reality seemed to be made synonymous
with fact. In this sense fact, or the real, was set off against the
ideal. Knowledge was viewed as the correspondence between real and
ideal. When we came to deal with the ideal itself--with the predicate
of the judgment--there appeared in it an element of fact or reality
which proved a serious stumbling-block for the theory. As image in my
mind, the idea is just as real as the so-called facts; but this sort of
reality according to the theory in question is neither the reality about
which we are judging nor a real quality of it. Both Bradley and
Bosanquet are forced to admit that the judgment ignores it, and is in so
far by nature inadequate to its appointed task of knowing reality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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