face. All these states of consciousness are real, as we conclude from
their having a beginning and actual effects.--Nor would it avail you to
object that in the absence of real elephants, and so on, the ideas of
them cannot be real. For ideas require only _some_ substrate in general;
the mere appearance of a thing is a sufficient substrate, and such an
appearance is present in the case in question, owing to a certain defect.
The thing we determine to be unreal because it is sublated; the idea is
non-sublated, and therefore real.

Nor can you quote in favour of your view--of the real being known
through the unreal--the instance of the stroke and the letter. The
letter being apprehended through the stroke (i.e. the written character)
does not furnish a case of the real being apprehended through the unreal;
for the stroke itself is real.--But the stroke causes the idea of the
letter only in so far as it is apprehended as being a letter, and this
'being a letter' is untrue!--Not so, we rejoin. If this 'being a letter'
were unreal it could not be a means of the apprehension of the letter;
for we neither observe nor can prove that what is non-existent and
indefinable constitutes a means.--Let then the idea of the letter
constitute the means!--In that case, we rejoin, the apprehension of the
real does not spring from the unreal; and besides, it would follow
therefrom that the means and what is to be effected thereby would be one,
i.e. both would be, without any distinction, the idea of the letter only.
Moreover, if the means were constituted by the stroke in so far as it is
_not_ the letter, the apprehension of all letters would result from the
sight of one stroke; for one stroke may easily be conceived as _not_
being _any_ letter.--But, in the same way as the word 'Devadatta'
conventionally denotes some particular man, so some particular stroke
apprehended by the eye may conventionally symbolise some particular
letter to be apprehended by the ear, and thus a particular stroke may be