As we have seen, this is an error, and an error which we all avoid in actual practice.

We do not take sensations for things, and we recognize clearly enough that it is one thing for a material object to exist and another for it to be perceived.
Why, then, use the word "experience"?
Simply because we have no better word.

We must use it, and not be misled by the associations which cling to it.

The word has this great advantage: it brings out clearly the fact that all our knowledge of the external world rests ultimately upon those phenomena which, when we consider them in relation to our senses, we recognize as sensations.

We cannot start out from mere imaginings to discover what the world was like in the ages past.
It is this truth that is recognized by the plain man, when he maintains that, in the last resort, we can know things only in so far as we see, touch, hear, taste, and smell them; and by the psychologist, when he tells us that, in sensation, the external world is revealed as directly as it is possible that it could be revealed.