''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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life with its hazards and incidents, or the events
and complications of history. All of these are accessible
to each of u-s, or, as Kinbote says, "to the
communal eye". We take them in through our senses
and through our intellects and seldom stop to consider
whether what we are taking in has an absolute reality,
or whether we even perceive things as they are in themselves.
Philosophers, however, have raised certain doubts.
Even by assuming that we perceive objects through the
medium of "ideas" (Descartes)55, or "ideas of sensation"
(Locke)56; while speaking of "our perceiving
ideas and perceiving sensible qualities" (Berkeley)57,
of "Vorstellungen" (Kant)58, of "sensations" (Mill)59,
or "sense-data" (Moore and Russell)60, they indicate
that it is their conviction that there is an element
of subjectivity in the process of perception. While
Descartes and Locke and Berkeley agree that ideas as
objects of acts of sensing do in fact "not exist'independently
of being perceived"61, Russell, for example,
does grant his sense-data such an independent existence
as "sensibilia", "objects 'of the same metaphysical
and physical status as sense-data', with the difference
that they [are] not actually sensed. "62 What is
sensed, the sense-data, for which he later substituted
"percepts"63, is "private to the observer whose mind
[it] helps to constitute. "64 This statement implies
that whatever we perceive may not in fact be what is
objectively there. Russell gives a concrete example
discussing the colour of a table which changes con-