The 'possible,' as something less than the actual and more than the
wholly unreal, is another of these magisterial notions of common
sense. Criticize them as you may, they persist; and we fly back to
them the moment critical pressure is relaxed. 'Self,' 'body,' in the
substantial or metaphysical sense--no one escapes subjection to
THOSE forms of thought. In practice, the common-sense DENKMITTEL are
uniformly victorious. Everyone, however instructed, still thinks of
a 'thing' in the common-sense way, as a permanent unit-subject that
'supports' its attributes interchangeably. No one stably or
sincerely uses the more critical notion, of a group of sense-
qualities united by a law. With these categories in our hand, we
make our plans and plot together, and connect all the remoter parts
of experience with what lies before our eyes. Our later and more
critical philosophies are mere fads and fancies compared with this
natural mother-tongue of thought.
Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our
understanding of things, a stage that satisfies in an
extraordinarily successful way the purposes for which we think.
'Things' do exist, even when we do not see them. Their 'kinds' also
exist.
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