Thus, to say nothing of the new FACTS which men add to the matter of
reality by the acts of their own lives, they have already impressed
their mental forms on that whole third of reality which I have
called 'previous truths.' Every hour brings its new percepts, its
own facts of sensation and relation, to be truly taken account of;
but the whole of our PAST dealings with such facts is already funded
in the previous truths. It is therefore only the smallest and
recentest fraction of the first two parts of reality that comes to
us without the human touch, and that fraction has immediately to
become humanized in the sense of being squared, assimilated, or in
some way adapted, to the humanized mass already there. As a matter
of fact we can hardly take in an impression at all, in the absence
of a pre-conception of what impressions there may possibly be.
When we talk of reality 'independent' of human thinking, then, it
seems a thing very hard to find. It reduces to the notion of what is
just entering into experience, and yet to be named, or else to some
imagined aboriginal presence in experience, before any belief about
the presence had arisen, before any human conception had been
applied. It is what is absolutely dumb and evanescent, the merely
ideal limit of our minds.
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