He has manifestly no right to ask us: How does the external world look when no one is looking?
How do things feel when no one feels them?
How shall I think of things, not as I think of them, but as they are?
If we are to give an account of the external world at all, it must evidently be _an account_ of the external world; _i.e._ it must be given in terms of our experience of things.

The only legitimate problem is to give a true account instead of a false one, to distinguish between what only appears and is not real and what both appears and is real.
Bearing this in mind, let us come back to the plain man's experience of the world.

He certainly seems to himself to perceive a real world of things, and he constantly distinguishes, in a way very serviceable to himself, between the merely apparent and the real.

There is, of course, a sense in which every experience is real; it is, at least, an experience; but when he contrasts real and apparent he means something more than this.

Experiences are not relegated to this class or to that merely at random, but the final decision is the outcome of a long experience of the differences which characterize different individual experiences and is an expression of the relations which are observed to hold between them.