What can be bought and sold and pushed about and have a cloth laid on it, and so on, cannot be a mere collection of sense-data. If the cloth completely hides the table, we shall derive no sense-data from the table, and therefore, if the table were merely sense-data, it would have ceased to exist, and the cloth would be suspended in empty air, resting, by a miracle, in the place where the table formerly was.
It seems to me that if we are actually carrying doubt to its radical extreme, the mistake is in differentiating the sense data of one object from another. We do not make th table disappear by covering it with a sheet, but merely cause ome collection of sense data to supersede another.
I still hold this absurd in the presence of common sense, but think this is more internally coherent than Russell's assertion.
