Note 189 — Introductory material

The essence of my contention is that, if experience is to be possible, every sensational This must, when attended to, be found, on the one hand, resolvable into Thises, and on the other hand dependent, for some of its adjectives, on external reference. The second of these theses follows from the first, for if we take one of the Thises contained in the first This, we get a new This necessarily related to the other Thises which make up the original This. I may, therefore, confine myself to the first proposition, which affirms that the object of perception must contain a diversity, not only of conceptual content, but of existence, and that this can only be known if sense-perception contains, as an element, some form of externality.