We it is who have to speak for them. This dumbness
of sensations has led such intellectualists as T.H. Green and Edward
Caird to shove them almost beyond the pale of philosophic
recognition, but pragmatists refuse to go so far. A sensation is
rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has
passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his
affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most expedient
to give.
Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain
arbitrary choice. By our inclusions and omissions we trace the
field's extent; by our emphasis we mark its foreground and its
background; by our order we read it in this direction or in that. We
receive in short the block of marble, but we carve the statue
ourselves.
This applies to the 'eternal' parts of reality as well: we shuffle
our perceptions of intrinsic relation and arrange them just as
freely. We read them in one serial order or another, class them in
this way or in that, treat one or the other as more fundamental,
until our beliefs about them form those bodies of truth known as
logics, geometries, or arithmetics, in each and all of which the
form and order in which the whole is cast is flagrantly man-made.
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