Is not the object _there_?
does he not _see_ and _feel_ it?
Why doubt such evidence as this?
He who tells him that the external world does not exist seems to be denying what is immediately given in his experience.
The man who looks at things in this way assumes, of course, that the external object is known directly, and is not a something merely inferred to exist from the presence of a representative image.

May one embrace this belief and abandon the other one?
If we elect to do this, we appear to be in difficulties at once.

All the considerations which made us distinguish so carefully between our ideas of things and the things themselves crowd in upon us.

Can it be that we know things independently of the avenues of the senses?
Would a man with different senses know things just as we do?
How can any man suffer from an hallucination, if things are not inferred from images, but are known independently?
The difficulties encountered appear sufficiently serious even if we keep to that knowledge of things which seems to be given in common experience.

But even the plain man has heard of atoms and molecules; and if he accepts the extension of knowledge offered him by the man of science, he must admit that, whatever this apparently immediately perceived external thing may be, it cannot be the external thing that science assures him is out there in space beyond his body, and which must be a very different sort of thing from the thing he seems to perceive.