Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: volume 1 to a discussion of those special phenomena, such as illusion and error, which are supposed to discredit natural realism, and set going a train of thought that cannot be stopped short of subjectivism. It is necessary to inquire closely into the mechanism of perception, and into the logic of contradiction and falsity. And it is necessary to obtain a definition of the central thesis of realism, the thesis of independence, that shall not be so loose as to violate the facts, nor so vague and formal as to disregard them.2 THE REALISTIC POLEMIC Inasmuch as subjectivism, renewed and fortified under the name of 'idealism,' is the dominant philosophy of the day, it affords the chief resistance which an innovating philosophy such as realism has to overcome. The realistic polemic is therefore primarily a polemic against subjectivism; but the errors of which realism finds subjectivistic philosophies to be guilty, are not necessarily confined to such philosophies. They may be generalized; and in so far as they are generalized their discovery is of greater moment. The following are some of the traditional errors which neo-realism has thus far succeeded in generalizing. 1. The fallacy of argument from the ego-centric predicament. — The 'ego-centric predicament' consists in the impossibility of finding anything that is not known.3 This is a predicament rather than a discovery, because it refers to a difficulty of procedure, rather than to a character of things. It is impossible to eliminate the knower without interrupting observation; hence the peculiar difficulty of discovering what characters, if any, things possess when not known. When this situation is formulated as a proposition concerning things, the result is either the redundant inference that all known things are known, ...