In order to extricate himself from the paradoxes in which he finds himself involved, the neo-realist is finally compelled to agree that the objects behind the mirror, etc., are not quite the same things as physical objects. So he calls them sensa or sense-objects. When requested to justify his belief in these mysterious, shadowy existents, he tells us that sensa and sense-objects certainly exist, for otherwise how could a round coin ever be seen as an ellipse? Obviously (so he maintains) in addition to the round physical object, there must be an “elliptical sensum” present, and it is this that we are sensing. It is scarcely necessary to say that no scientist could be in sympathy with such loose arguments, and accept as sound this arbitrary materialisation of qualities. Forms and colour sensations are all that we are conscious of visually. It is only by inference, as a result of a co-ordination of sensations, that we are finally led to believe in the existence of a round coin in the objective world. After we have reached this stage of knowledge it is a simple matter to account for the elliptical impression we receive of the coin, since an image of this shape can be proved to have been formed on the retina. An application of the laws of geometrical optics, and a slight knowledge of the eye’s structure, suffice; and the “sensa” and “sense-objects” of the neo-realist can be discarded as perfectly useless hypotheses. A more detailed study, which we shall spare the reader, would convince us that neo-realism, when taken literally, rests on a confusion between inferences and direct recognitions, and leads to contradictions when an attempt is made to conceive of an objective world transcending our private views. On the other hand, if taken with a grain of salt, mitigated, as occasion demands, by such palliatives as “pseudo” or “peculiar sort of” or “not quite the same as,” it resolves itself into a mere play on words, into a giving of the same name to things which even the neo-realist would concede to be essentially different. [Pg 176]