ABSTRACT
I p r o p o s e now to state more fully the theory that appearances are a peculiar kind of objects, and to con sider what sort of objects they must be. The reader will bear in mind throughout the whole of the long story which follows that there is a totally different view of sensible appearance, viz., the Multiple Relation Theory, and that this may quite possibly be true. In this book I shall leave it wholly aside. On the theory that we are now going to discuss, whenever a penny looks to me elliptical, what really happens is that I am aware of an object which is, in fact elliptical. This object is connected in some specially intimate way with the round physical penny, and for this reason is called an appearance of the penny. It really is elliptical, and for this reason the penny is said to look elliptical. We may generalise this theory of sensible appearance as follows: Whenever I truly judge that x appears to me to have the sensible quality q, what happens is that I am directly aware of a certain object y, which (a) really does have the quality q, and (b) stands in some peculiarly intimate relation, yet to be determined, to x. (At the present stage, for all that we know, y might sometimes be identical with x , or
might be literally a part of x.) Such objects as y I am going to call Sensa. Thus, when I look at a penny from the side, what happens, on the present theory, is at least this : I have a sensation, whose object is an elliptical, brown sensum ; and this sensum is related in some specially intimate way to a certain round physical object, viz., the penny.
