A Theory of Direct Realism: and the Relation of Realism to Idealism

Abstract

THIS book is the outcome of a bold and engaging enterprise. It sets out to do two things; first (and chiefly) to cut a clean way through the tangled growth of modern epistemology by justifying the plain man's view that the perceiving mind is in immediate contact with the external world, “as this actually exists,” or that ordinary sense-perception, so far as it goes, “is, in principle, veridical”; secondly, to show that Hegelian idealism is entirely compatible with this supposedly antagonistic realist view.