In the relative sense , then, the sense in which we contrast reality with simple unreality, and in which one thing is said to have more reality than another, and to be more believed, reality means simply relation to our emotional and active life.This is the only sense which the word ever has in the mouths of practical men.In this sense, whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real ; whenever an object so appeals to us that we turn to it, accept it, fill our mind with it, or practically take account of it, so far it is real for us, and we believe it.Whenever, on the contrary, we ignore it, fail to consider it or act upon it, despise it, reject it, forget it, so far it is unreal for us and disbelieved Hume's account of the matter was then essentially correct, when he said that belief in anything was simply the having the idea of it in a lively and active manner:
"I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object than the imagination alone is ever able to attain....It consists not in the peculiar nature or order of the ideas, but in the manner of their conception and in their feeling to the mind.I confess that it is impossible perfectly to explain this feeling or manner of conception....Its true and proper name...is belief, which is a term that everyone sufficiently understands in common life.And in philosophy we can go no farther than assert that belief is something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the idea of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination. It gives them more weight and influence; makes them appear of greater importance; enforces them in the mind; gives them a superior influence on the passions, and renders them the governing principle in our actions."
Or as Prof.Bain puts it: "In its essential character, belief is a phase of our active nature -- otherwise called the Will."
"The object of belief, then, reality or real existence, in something quite different from all the other predicates which a subject may possess.
Those are properties intellectually or sensibly intuited.When we add any one of them to the subject, we increase the intrinsic content of the latter, we enrich its picture in our mind.But adding reality does not enrich the picture in any such inward way; it leaves it inwardly as it finds it, and only fixes it and stamps it in to us.
"The real," as Kant says, "contains no more than the possible.A hundred real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred possible dollars.
...By whatever, and by however many, predicates I may think a thing, nothing is added to it if I add that the thing exists....Whatever, therefore, our concept of an object may contain, we must always step outside of it in order to attribute to it existence."
The 'stepping outside' of it is the establishment either of immediate practical relations between it and ourselves, or of relations between it and other objects with which we have immediate practical relations.Relations of this sort, which are as yet not transcended or superseded by others, are ipso facto real relations, and confer reality upon their objective term.The fons et origo of all reality, whether from the absolute or the practical point of view, is thus subjective, is ourselves.
As bare logical thinkers, without emotional reaction, we give reality to whatever objects we think of, for they are really phenomena, or objects of our pausing thought, if nothing more.But, as thinkers with emotional reaction, to give what seems to be a still higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to WITH A WILL.These are our living realities; and not only these, but all the other things which are intimately connected with these.Reality, starting from our Ego, thus sheds itself from point to point-first, upon all objects which have an immediate sting of interest for our Ego in them, and next, upon the objects most continuously related with these.It only fails when the connecting thread is lost.A whole system may be real, if it only hang to our Ego by one immediately stinging term.But what contradicts any such stinging term, even though it be another stinging term itself, is either not believed, or only believe drifter settlement of the dispute.
We reach thus the important conclusion that our own reality, that sense of our own, life which we at every moment possess, is the ultimate of ultimates for our belief.'As sure as I exist!' -- this is our uttermost warrant for the being of all other things.As Descartes made the indubitable reality of the cogito go bail for the reality of all that the cogito involved, so we all of us, feeling our own present reality with absolutely coercive force, ascribe an all but equal degree of reality, first to whatever things we lay hold on with a sense of personal need, and second, to whatever farther things continuously belong with these."Mein Jetzt und Hier," as Prof.Lipps says, "ist der letzte Angelpunkt für alle Wirklichkeit, also alle Erkenntniss."
The world of living realities as contrasted with unrealities is thus anchored in the Ego, considered as an active and emotional term. That is the hook from which the rest dangles, the absolute support.And as from a painted hook it has been said that one can only hang a painted chain, so conversely, from a real hook only a real chain can properly be hung.Whatever things have intimate and continuous connection with my life are things of whose reality I cannot doubt.Whatever things fail to establish this connection are things which are practically no better for me than if they existed not at all.
In certain forms of melancholic perversion of the sensibilities and reactive powers, nothing touches us intimately, rouses us, or wakens natural feeling.The consequence is the complaint so often heard from melancholic patients, that nothing is believed in by them as it used to be, and that all sense of reality is fled from life.They are sheathed in india-rubber;
