Our Knowledge of the External World as a

Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy

By

Bertrand Russell

1
PREFACE

The following lectures[1] are an attempt to show, by means of examples,

the nature, capacity, and limitations of the logical-analytic method in

philosophy. This method, of which the first complete example is to be

found in the writings of Frege, has gradually, in the course of actual

research, increasingly forced itself upon me as something perfectly

definite, capable of embodiment in maxims, and adequate, in all branches

of philosophy, to yield whatever objective scientific knowledge it is

possible to obtain. Most of the methods hitherto practised have

professed to lead to more ambitious results than any that logical

analysis can claim to reach, but unfortunately these results have always

been such as many competent philosophers considered inadmissible.

Regarded merely as hypotheses and as aids to imagination, the great

systems of the past serve a very useful purpose, and are abundantly

worthy of study. But something different is required if philosophy is to

become a science, and to aim at results independent of the tastes and

temperament of the philosopher who advocates them. In what follows, I

have endeavoured to show, however imperfectly, the way by which I

believe that this desideratum is to be found.

[1] Delivered as Lowell Lectures in Boston, in March and April 1914.

The central problem by which I have sought to illustrate method is the

problem of the relation between the crude data of sense and the space,

2
time, and matter of mathematical physics. I have been made aware of the

importance of this problem by my friend and collaborator Dr Whitehead,

to whom are due almost all the differences between the views advocated

here and those suggested in The Problems of Philosophy.[2] I owe to

him the definition of points, the suggestion for the treatment of

instants and "things," and the whole conception of the world of physics

as a construction rather than an inference. What is said on these

topics here is, in fact, a rough preliminary account of the more precise

results which he is giving in the fourth volume of our Principia

Mathematica.[3] It will be seen that if his way of dealing with these

topics is capable of being successfully carried through, a wholly new

light is thrown on the time-honoured controversies of realists and

idealists, and a method is obtained of solving all that is soluble in

their problem.

[2] London and New York, 1912 ("Home University Library").

[3] The first volume was published at Cambridge in 1910, the second in

1912, and the third in 1913.

The speculations of the past as to the reality or unreality of the world

of physics were baffled, at the outset, by the absence of any

satisfactory theory of the mathematical infinite. This difficulty has

been removed by the work of Georg Cantor. But the positive and detailed

solution of the problem by means of mathematical constructions based

upon sensible objects as data has only been rendered possible by the

3
growth of mathematical logic, without which it is practically impossible

to manipulate ideas of the requisite abstractness and complexity. This

aspect, which is somewhat obscured in a merely popular outline such as

is contained in the following lectures, will become plain as soon as Dr

Whitehead's work is published. In pure logic, which, however, will be

very briefly discussed in these lectures, I have had the benefit of

vitally important discoveries, not yet published, by my friend Mr Ludwig

Wittgenstein.

Since my purpose was to illustrate method, I have included much that is

tentative and incomplete, for it is not by the study of finished

structures alone that the manner of construction can be learnt. Except

in regard to such matters as Cantor's theory of infinity, no finality is

claimed for the theories suggested; but I believe that where they are

found to require modification, this will be discovered by substantially

the same method as that which at present makes them appear probable, and

it is on this ground that I ask the reader to be tolerant of their

incompleteness.

Cambridge,

June 1914.

4
CONTENTS

LECTURE

I. Current Tendencies

II. Logic as the Essence of Philosophy

III. On our Knowledge of the External World

IV. The World of Physics and the World of Sense

V. The Theory of Continuity

VI. The Problem of Infinity considered Historically

VII. The Positive Theory of Infinity

VIII. On the Notion of Cause, with Applications to

the Free-will Problem

5
LECTURE I

CURRENT TENDENCIES

Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and

achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning. Ever since

Thales said that all is water, philosophers have been ready with glib

assertions about the sum-total of things; and equally glib denials have

come from other philosophers ever since Thales was contradicted by

Anaximander. I believe that the time has now arrived when this

unsatisfactory state of things can be brought to an end. In the

following course of lectures I shall try, chiefly by taking certain

special problems as examples, to indicate wherein the claims of

philosophers have been excessive, and why their achievements have not

been greater. The problems and the method of philosophy have, I believe,

been misconceived by all schools, many of its traditional problems being

insoluble with our means of knowledge, while other more neglected but

not less important problems can, by a more patient and more adequate

method, be solved with all the precision and certainty to which the most

advanced sciences have attained.

Among present-day philosophies, we may distinguish three principal

types, often combined in varying proportions by a single philosopher,

but in essence and tendency distinct. The first of these, which I shall

call the classical tradition, descends in the main from Kant and Hegel;

6
it represents the attempt to adapt to present needs the methods and

results of the great constructive philosophers from Plato downwards. The

second type, which may be called evolutionism, derived its predominance

from Darwin, and must be reckoned as having had Herbert Spencer for its

first philosophical representative; but in recent times it has become,

chiefly through William James and M. Bergson, far bolder and far more

searching in its innovations than it was in the hands of Herbert

Spencer. The third type, which may be called "logical atomism" for want

of a better name, has gradually crept into philosophy through the

critical scrutiny of mathematics. This type of philosophy, which is the

one that I wish to advocate, has not as yet many whole-hearted

adherents, but the "new realism" which owes its inception to Harvard is

very largely impregnated with its spirit. It represents, I believe, the

same kind of advance as was introduced into physics by Galileo: the

substitution of piecemeal, detailed, and verifiable results for large

untested generalities recommended only by a certain appeal to

imagination. But before we can understand the changes advocated by this

new philosophy, we must briefly examine and criticise the other two

types with which it has to contend.

A. The Classical Tradition

Twenty years ago, the classical tradition, having vanquished the

opposing tradition of the English empiricists, held almost unquestioned

sway in all Anglo-Saxon universities. At the present day, though it is

7
losing ground, many of the most prominent teachers still adhere to it.

In academic France, in spite of M. Bergson, it is far stronger than all

its opponents combined; and in Germany it has many vigorous advocates.

Nevertheless, it represents on the whole a decaying force, and it has

failed to adapt itself to the temper of the age. Its advocates are, in

the main, those whose extra-philosophical knowledge is literary, rather

than those who have felt the inspiration of science. There are, apart

from reasoned arguments, certain general intellectual forces against

it--the same general forces which are breaking down the other great

syntheses of the past, and making our age one of bewildered groping

where our ancestors walked in the clear daylight of unquestioning

certainty.

The original impulse out of which the classical tradition developed was

the naïve faith of the Greek philosophers in the omnipotence of

reasoning. The discovery of geometry had intoxicated them, and its a

priori deductive method appeared capable of universal application. They

would prove, for instance, that all reality is one, that there is no

such thing as change, that the world of sense is a world of mere

illusion; and the strangeness of their results gave them no qualms

because they believed in the correctness of their reasoning. Thus it

came to be thought that by mere thinking the most surprising and

important truths concerning the whole of reality could be established

with a certainty which no contrary observations could shake. As the

vital impulse of the early philosophers died away, its place was taken

by authority and tradition, reinforced, in the Middle Ages and almost to

8
our own day, by systematic theology. Modern philosophy, from Descartes

onwards, though not bound by authority like that of the Middle Ages,

still accepted more or less uncritically the Aristotelian logic.

Moreover, it still believed, except in Great Britain, that a priori

reasoning could reveal otherwise undiscoverable secrets about the

universe, and could prove reality to be quite different from what, to

direct observation, it appears to be. It is this belief, rather than any

particular tenets resulting from it, that I regard as the distinguishing

characteristic of the classical tradition, and as hitherto the main

obstacle to a scientific attitude in philosophy.

The nature of the philosophy embodied in the classical tradition may be

made clearer by taking a particular exponent as an illustration. For

this purpose, let us consider for a moment the doctrines of Mr Bradley,

who is probably the most distinguished living representative of this

school. Mr Bradley's Appearance and Reality is a book consisting of

two parts, the first called Appearance, the second Reality. The

first part examines and condemns almost all that makes up our everyday

world: things and qualities, relations, space and time, change,

causation, activity, the self. All these, though in some sense facts

which qualify reality, are not real as they appear. What is real is one

single, indivisible, timeless whole, called the Absolute, which is in

some sense spiritual, but does not consist of souls, or of thought and

will as we know them. And all this is established by abstract logical

reasoning professing to find self-contradictions in the categories

condemned as mere appearance, and to leave no tenable alternative to the

9
kind of Absolute which is finally affirmed to be real.

One brief example may suffice to illustrate Mr Bradley's method. The

world appears to be full of many things with various relations to each

other--right and left, before and after, father and son, and so on. But

relations, according to Mr Bradley, are found on examination to be

self-contradictory and therefore impossible. He first argues that, if

there are relations, there must be qualities between which they hold.

This part of his argument need not detain us. He then proceeds:

"But how the relation can stand to the qualities is, on the other side,

unintelligible. If it is nothing to the qualities, then they are not

related at all; and, if so, as we saw, they have ceased to be qualities,

and their relation is a nonentity. But if it is to be something to them,

then clearly we shall require a new connecting relation. For the

relation hardly can be the mere adjective of one or both of its terms;

or, at least, as such it seems indefensible. And, being something

itself, if it does not itself bear a relation to the terms, in what

intelligible way will it succeed in being anything to them? But here

again we are hurried off into the eddy of a hopeless process, since we

are forced to go on finding new relations without end. The links are

united by a link, and this bond of union is a link which also has two

ends; and these require each a fresh link to connect them with the old.

The problem is to find how the relation can stand to its qualities, and

this problem is insoluble."[4]

10
 [4] Appearance and Reality, pp. 32-33.

I do not propose to examine this argument in detail, or to show the

exact points where, in my opinion, it is fallacious. I have quoted it

only as an example of method. Most people will admit, I think, that it

is calculated to produce bewilderment rather than conviction, because

there is more likelihood of error in a very subtle, abstract, and

difficult argument than in so patent a fact as the interrelatedness of

the things in the world. To the early Greeks, to whom geometry was

practically the only known science, it was possible to follow reasoning

with assent even when it led to the strangest conclusions. But to us,

with our methods of experiment and observation, our knowledge of the

long history of a priori errors refuted by empirical science, it has

become natural to suspect a fallacy in any deduction of which the

conclusion appears to contradict patent facts. It is easy to carry such

suspicion too far, and it is very desirable, if possible, actually to

discover the exact nature of the error when it exists. But there is no

doubt that what we may call the empirical outlook has become part of

most educated people's habit of mind; and it is this, rather than any

definite argument, that has diminished the hold of the classical

tradition upon students of philosophy and the instructed public

generally.

The function of logic in philosophy, as I shall try to show at a later

stage, is all-important; but I do not think its function is that which

it has in the classical tradition. In that tradition, logic becomes

11
constructive through negation. Where a number of alternatives seem, at

first sight, to be equally possible, logic is made to condemn all of

them except one, and that one is then pronounced to be realised in the

actual world. Thus the world is constructed by means of logic, with

little or no appeal to concrete experience. The true function of logic

is, in my opinion, exactly the opposite of this. As applied to matters

of experience, it is analytic rather than constructive; taken a

priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives

more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed primâ

facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the

world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is. This

change, which has been brought about by an internal revolution in logic,

has swept away the ambitious constructions of traditional metaphysics,

even for those whose faith in logic is greatest; while to the many who

regard logic as a chimera the paradoxical systems to which it has given

rise do not seem worthy even of refutation. Thus on all sides these

systems have ceased to attract, and even the philosophical world tends

more and more to pass them by.

One or two of the favourite doctrines of the school we are considering

may be mentioned to illustrate the nature of its claims. The universe,

it tells us, is an "organic unity," like an animal or a perfect work of

art. By this it means, roughly speaking, that all the different parts

fit together and co-operate, and are what they are because of their

place in the whole. This belief is sometimes advanced dogmatically,

while at other times it is defended by certain logical arguments. If it

12
is true, every part of the universe is a microcosm, a miniature

reflection of the whole. If we knew ourselves thoroughly, according to

this doctrine, we should know everything. Common sense would naturally

object that there are people--say in China--with whom our relations are

so indirect and trivial that we cannot infer anything important as to

them from any fact about ourselves. If there are living beings in Mars

or in more distant parts of the universe, the same argument becomes even

stronger. But further, perhaps the whole contents of the space and time

in which we live form only one of many universes, each seeming to itself

complete. And thus the conception of the necessary unity of all that is

resolves itself into the poverty of imagination, and a freer logic

emancipates us from the strait-waistcoated benevolent institution which

idealism palms off as the totality of being.

Another very important doctrine held by most, though not all, of the

school we are examining is the doctrine that all reality is what is

called "mental" or "spiritual," or that, at any rate, all reality is

dependent for its existence upon what is mental. This view is often

particularised into the form which states that the relation of knower

and known is fundamental, and that nothing can exist unless it either

knows or is known. Here again the same legislative function is ascribed

to a priori argumentation: it is thought that there are contradictions

in an unknown reality. Again, if I am not mistaken, the argument is

fallacious, and a better logic will show that no limits can be set to

the extent and nature of the unknown. And when I speak of the unknown, I

do not mean merely what we personally do not know, but what is not known

13
to any mind. Here as elsewhere, while the older logic shut out

possibilities and imprisoned imagination within the walls of the

familiar, the newer logic shows rather what may happen, and refuses to

decide as to what must happen.

The classical tradition in philosophy is the last surviving child of two

very diverse parents: the Greek belief in reason, and the mediæval

belief in the tidiness of the universe. To the schoolmen, who lived amid

wars, massacres, and pestilences, nothing appeared so delightful as

safety and order. In their idealising dreams, it was safety and order

that they sought: the universe of Thomas Aquinas or Dante is as small

and neat as a Dutch interior. To us, to whom safety has become monotony,

to whom the primeval savageries of nature are so remote as to become a

mere pleasing condiment to our ordered routine, the world of dreams is

very different from what it was amid the wars of Guelf and Ghibelline.

Hence William James's protest against what he calls the "block universe"

of the classical tradition; hence Nietzsche's worship of force; hence

the verbal bloodthirstiness of many quiet literary men. The barbaric

substratum of human nature, unsatisfied in action, finds an outlet in

imagination. In philosophy, as elsewhere, this tendency is visible; and

it is this, rather than formal argument, that has thrust aside the

classical tradition for a philosophy which fancies itself more virile

and more vital.

B. Evolutionism

14
Evolutionism, in one form or another, is the prevailing creed of our

time. It dominates our politics, our literature, and not least our

philosophy. Nietzsche, pragmatism, Bergson, are phases in its

philosophic development, and their popularity far beyond the circles of

professional philosophers shows its consonance with the spirit of the

age. It believes itself firmly based on science, a liberator of hopes,

an inspirer of an invigorating faith in human power, a sure antidote to

the ratiocinative authority of the Greeks and the dogmatic authority of

mediæval systems. Against so fashionable and so agreeable a creed it may

seem useless to raise a protest; and with much of its spirit every

modern man must be in sympathy. But I think that, in the intoxication of

a quick success, much that is important and vital to a true

understanding of the universe has been forgotten. Something of Hellenism

must be combined with the new spirit before it can emerge from the

ardour of youth into the wisdom of manhood. And it is time to remember

that biology is neither the only science, nor yet the model to which all

other sciences must adapt themselves. Evolutionism, as I shall try to

show, is not a truly scientific philosophy, either in its method or in

the problems which it considers. The true scientific philosophy is

something more arduous and more aloof, appealing to less mundane hopes,

and requiring a severer discipline for its successful practice.

Darwin's Origin of Species persuaded the world that the difference

between different species of animals and plants is not the fixed,

immutable difference that it appears to be. The doctrine of natural

15
kinds, which had rendered classification easy and definite, which was

enshrined in the Aristotelian tradition, and protected by its supposed

necessity for orthodox dogma, was suddenly swept away for ever out of

the biological world. The difference between man and the lower animals,

which to our human conceit appears enormous, was shown to be a gradual

achievement, involving intermediate beings who could not with certainty

be placed either within or without the human family. The sun and planets

had already been shown by Laplace to be very probably derived from a

primitive more or less undifferentiated nebula. Thus the old fixed

landmarks became wavering and indistinct, and all sharp outlines were

blurred. Things and species lost their boundaries, and none could say

where they began or where they ended.

But if human conceit was staggered for a moment by its kinship with the

ape, it soon found a way to reassert itself, and that way is the

"philosophy" of evolution. A process which led from the amoeba to man

appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress--though whether

the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known. Hence the cycle

of changes which science had shown to be the probable history of the

past was welcomed as revealing a law of development towards good in the

universe--an evolution or unfolding of an ideal slowly embodying itself

in the actual. But such a view, though it might satisfy Spencer and

those whom we may call Hegelian evolutionists, could not be accepted as

adequate by the more whole-hearted votaries of change. An ideal to which

the world continuously approaches is, to these minds, too dead and

static to be inspiring. Not only the aspirations, but the ideal too,

16
must change and develop with the course of evolution; there must be no

fixed goal, but a continual fashioning of fresh needs by the impulse

which is life and which alone gives unity to the process.

Ever since the seventeenth century, those whom William James described

as the "tender-minded" have been engaged in a desperate struggle with

the mechanical view of the course of nature which physical science seems

to impose. A great part of the attractiveness of the classical tradition

was due to the partial escape from mechanism which it provided. But now,

with the influence of biology, the "tender-minded" believe that a more

radical escape is possible, sweeping aside not merely the laws of

physics, but the whole apparently immutable apparatus of logic, with its

fixed concepts, its general principles, and its reasonings which seem

able to compel even the most unwilling assent. The older kind of

teleology, therefore, which regarded the End as a fixed goal, already

partially visible, towards which we were gradually approaching, is

rejected by M. Bergson as not allowing enough for the absolute dominion

of change. After explaining why he does not accept mechanism, he

proceeds:[5]

"But radical finalism is quite as unacceptable, and for the same reason.

The doctrine of teleology, in its extreme form, as we find it in Leibniz

for example, implies that things and beings merely realise a programme

previously arranged. But if there is nothing unforeseen, no invention or

creation in the universe, time is useless again. As in the mechanistic

hypothesis, here again it is supposed that all is given. Finalism thus

17
understood is only inverted mechanism. It springs from the same

postulate, with this sole difference, that in the movement of our finite

intellects along successive things, whose successiveness is reduced to a

mere appearance, it holds in front of us the light with which it claims

to guide us, instead of putting it behind. It substitutes the attraction

of the future for the impulsion of the past. But succession remains none

the less a mere appearance, as indeed does movement itself. In the

doctrine of Leibniz, time is reduced to a confused perception, relative

to the human standpoint, a perception which would vanish, like a rising

mist, for a mind seated at the centre of things.

"Yet finalism is not, like mechanism, a doctrine with fixed rigid

outlines. It admits of as many inflections as we like. The mechanistic

philosophy is to be taken or left: it must be left if the least grain of

dust, by straying from the path foreseen by mechanics, should show the

slightest trace of spontaneity. The doctrine of final causes, on the

contrary, will never be definitively refuted. If one form of it be put

aside, it will take another. Its principle, which is essentially

psychological, is very flexible. It is so extensible, and thereby so

comprehensive, that one accepts something of it as soon as one rejects

pure mechanism. The theory we shall put forward in this book will

therefore necessarily partake of finalism to a certain extent."

[5] Creative Evolution, English translation, p. 41.

M. Bergson's form of finalism depends upon his conception of life. Life,

18
in his philosophy, is a continuous stream, in which all divisions are

artificial and unreal. Separate things, beginnings and endings, are mere

convenient fictions: there is only smooth, unbroken transition. The

beliefs of to-day may count as true to-day, if they carry us along the

stream; but to-morrow they will be false, and must be replaced by new

beliefs to meet the new situation. All our thinking consists of

convenient fictions, imaginary congealings of the stream: reality flows

on in spite of all our fictions, and though it can be lived, it cannot

be conceived in thought. Somehow, without explicit statement, the

assurance is slipped in that the future, though we cannot foresee it,

will be better than the past or the present: the reader is like the

child who expects a sweet because it has been told to open its mouth and

shut its eyes. Logic, mathematics, physics disappear in this philosophy,

because they are too "static"; what is real is an impulse and movement

towards a goal which, like the rainbow, recedes as we advance, and makes

every place different when we reach it from what it appeared to be at a

distance.

Now I do not propose at present to enter upon a technical examination of

this philosophy. At present I wish to make only two criticisms of

it--first, that its truth does not follow from what science has rendered

probable concerning the facts of evolution, and secondly, that the

motives and interests which inspire it are so exclusively practical, and

the problems with which it deals are so special, that it can hardly be

regarded as really touching any of the questions that to my mind

constitute genuine philosophy.

19
(1) What biology has rendered probable is that the diverse species arose

by adaptation from a less differentiated ancestry. This fact is in

itself exceedingly interesting, but it is not the kind of fact from

which philosophical consequences follow. Philosophy is general, and

takes an impartial interest in all that exists. The changes suffered by

minute portions of matter on the earth's surface are very important to

us as active sentient beings; but to us as philosophers they have no

greater interest than other changes in portions of matter elsewhere. And

if the changes on the earth's surface during the last few millions of

years appear to our present ethical notions to be in the nature of a

progress, that gives no ground for believing that progress is a general

law of the universe. Except under the influence of desire, no one would

admit for a moment so crude a generalisation from such a tiny selection

of facts. What does result, not specially from biology, but from all the

sciences which deal with what exists, is that we cannot understand the

world unless we can understand change and continuity. This is even more

evident in physics than it is in biology. But the analysis of change and

continuity is not a problem upon which either physics or biology throws

any light: it is a problem of a new kind, belonging to a different kind

of study. The question whether evolutionism offers a true or a false

answer to this problem is not, therefore, a question to be solved by

appeals to particular facts, such as biology and physics reveal. In

assuming dogmatically a certain answer to this question, evolutionism

ceases to be scientific, yet it is only in touching on this question

that evolutionism reaches the subject-matter of philosophy. Evolutionism

20
thus consists of two parts: one not philosophical, but only a hasty

generalisation of the kind which the special sciences might hereafter

confirm or confute; the other not scientific, but a mere unsupported

dogma, belonging to philosophy by its subject-matter, but in no way

deducible from the facts upon which evolution relies.

(2) The predominant interest of evolutionism is in the question of human

destiny, or at least of the destiny of Life. It is more interested in

morality and happiness than in knowledge for its own sake. It must be

admitted that the same may be said of many other philosophies, and that

a desire for the kind of knowledge which philosophy really can give is

very rare. But if philosophy is to become scientific--and it is our

object to discover how this can be achieved--it is necessary first and

foremost that philosophers should acquire the disinterested intellectual

curiosity which characterises the genuine man of science. Knowledge

concerning the future--which is the kind of knowledge that must be

sought if we are to know about human destiny--is possible within certain

narrow limits. It is impossible to say how much the limits may be

enlarged with the progress of science. But what is evident is that any

proposition about the future belongs by its subject-matter to some

particular science, and is to be ascertained, if at all, by the methods

of that science. Philosophy is not a short cut to the same kind of

results as those of the other sciences: if it is to be a genuine study,

it must have a province of its own, and aim at results which the other

sciences can neither prove nor disprove.

21
The consideration that philosophy, if there is such a study, must

consist of propositions which could not occur in the other sciences, is

one which has very far-reaching consequences. All the questions which

have what is called a human interest--such, for example, as the question

of a future life--belong, at least in theory, to special sciences, and

are capable, at least in theory, of being decided by empirical evidence.

Philosophers have too often, in the past, permitted themselves to

pronounce on empirical questions, and found themselves, as a result, in

disastrous conflict with well-attested facts. We must, therefore,

renounce the hope that philosophy can promise satisfaction to our

mundane desires. What it can do, when it is purified from all practical

taint, is to help us to understand the general aspects of the world and

the logical analysis of familiar but complex things. Through this

achievement, by the suggestion of fruitful hypotheses, it may be

indirectly useful in other sciences, notably mathematics, physics, and

psychology. But a genuinely scientific philosophy cannot hope to appeal

to any except those who have the wish to understand, to escape from

intellectual bewilderment. It offers, in its own domain, the kind of

satisfaction which the other sciences offer. But it does not offer, or

attempt to offer, a solution of the problem of human destiny, or of the

destiny of the universe.

Evolutionism, if what has been said is true, is to be regarded as a

hasty generalisation from certain rather special facts, accompanied by a

dogmatic rejection of all attempts at analysis, and inspired by

interests which are practical rather than theoretical. In spite,

22
therefore, of its appeal to detailed results in various sciences, it

cannot be regarded as any more genuinely scientific than the classical

tradition which it has replaced. How philosophy is to be rendered

scientific, and what is the true subject-matter of philosophy, I shall

try to show first by examples of certain achieved results, and then more

generally. We will begin with the problem of the physical conceptions of

space and time and matter, which, as we have seen, are challenged by the

contentions of the evolutionists. That these conceptions stand in need

of reconstruction will be admitted, and is indeed increasingly urged by

physicists themselves. It will also be admitted that the reconstruction

must take more account of change and the universal flux than is done in

the older mechanics with its fundamental conception of an indestructible

matter. But I do not think the reconstruction required is on Bergsonian

lines, nor do I think that his rejection of logic can be anything but

harmful. I shall not, however, adopt the method of explicit controversy,

but rather the method of independent inquiry, starting from what, in a

pre-philosophic stage, appear to be facts, and keeping always as close

to these initial data as the requirements of consistency will permit.

Although explicit controversy is almost always fruitless in philosophy,

owing to the fact that no two philosophers ever understand one another,

yet it seems necessary to say something at the outset in justification

of the scientific as against the mystical attitude. Metaphysics, from

the first, has been developed by the union or the conflict of these two

attitudes. Among the earliest Greek philosophers, the Ionians were more

scientific and the Sicilians more mystical.[6] But among the latter,

23
Pythagoras, for example, was in himself a curious mixture of the two

tendencies: the scientific attitude led him to his proposition on

right-angled triangles, while his mystic insight showed him that it is

wicked to eat beans. Naturally enough, his followers divided into two

sects, the lovers of right-angled triangles and the abhorrers of beans;

but the former sect died out, leaving, however, a haunting flavour of

mysticism over much Greek mathematical speculation, and in particular

over Plato's views on mathematics. Plato, of course, embodies both the

scientific and the mystical attitudes in a higher form than his

predecessors, but the mystical attitude is distinctly the stronger of

the two, and secures ultimate victory whenever the conflict is sharp.

Plato, moreover, adopted from the Eleatics the device of using logic to

defeat common sense, and thus to leave the field clear for mysticism--a

device still employed in our own day by the adherents of the classical

tradition.

[6] Cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, pp. 85 ff.

The logic used in defence of mysticism seems to me faulty as logic, and

in a later lecture I shall criticise it on this ground. But the more

thorough-going mystics do not employ logic, which they despise: they

appeal instead directly to the immediate deliverance of their insight.

Now, although fully developed mysticism is rare in the West, some

tincture of it colours the thoughts of many people, particularly as

regards matters on which they have strong convictions not based on

evidence. In all who seek passionately for the fugitive and difficult

24
goods, the conviction is almost irresistible that there is in the world

something deeper, more significant, than the multiplicity of little

facts chronicled and classified by science. Behind the veil of these

mundane things, they feel, something quite different obscurely shimmers,

shining forth clearly in the great moments of illumination, which alone

give anything worthy to be called real knowledge of truth. To seek such

moments, therefore, is to them the way of wisdom, rather than, like the

man of science, to observe coolly, to analyse without emotion, and to

accept without question the equal reality of the trivial and the

important.

Of the reality or unreality of the mystic's world I know nothing. I have

no wish to deny it, nor even to declare that the insight which reveals

it is not a genuine insight. What I do wish to maintain--and it is here

that the scientific attitude becomes imperative--is that insight,

untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth, in

spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is first

suggested by its means. It is common to speak of an opposition between

instinct and reason; in the eighteenth century, the opposition was drawn

in favour of reason, but under the influence of Rousseau and the

romantic movement instinct was given the preference, first by those who

rebelled against artificial forms of government and thought, and then,

as the purely rationalistic defence of traditional theology became

increasingly difficult, by all who felt in science a menace to creeds

which they associated with a spiritual outlook on life and the world.

Bergson, under the name of "intuition," has raised instinct to the

25
position of sole arbiter of metaphysical truth. But in fact the

opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct,

intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which

subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it

is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other

beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force

rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realms, it

is insight that first arrives at what is new.

Where instinct and reason do sometimes conflict is in regard to single

beliefs, held instinctively, and held with such determination that no

degree of inconsistency with other beliefs leads to their abandonment.

Instinct, like all human faculties, is liable to error. Those in whom

reason is weak are often unwilling to admit this as regards themselves,

though all admit it in regard to others. Where instinct is least liable

to error is in practical matters as to which right judgment is a help to

survival; friendship and hostility in others, for instance, are often

felt with extraordinary discrimination through very careful disguises.

But even in such matters a wrong impression may be given by reserve or

flattery; and in matters less directly practical, such as philosophy

deals with, very strong instinctive beliefs may be wholly mistaken, as

we may come to know through their perceived inconsistency with other

equally strong beliefs. It is such considerations that necessitate the

harmonising mediation of reason, which tests our beliefs by their mutual

compatibility, and examines, in doubtful cases, the possible sources of

error on the one side and on the other. In this there is no opposition

26
to instinct as a whole, but only to blind reliance upon some one

interesting aspect of instinct to the exclusion of other more

commonplace but not less trustworthy aspects. It is such onesidedness,

not instinct itself, that reason aims at correcting.

These more or less trite maxims may be illustrated by application to

Bergson's advocacy of "intuition" as against "intellect." There are, he

says, "two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing. The first

implies that we move round the object; the second that we enter into it.

The first depends on the point of view at which we are placed and on the

symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither depends on a

point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first kind of knowledge may

be said to stop at the relative; the second, in those cases where it

is possible, to attain the absolute."[7] The second of these, which is

intuition, is, he says, "the kind of intellectual sympathy by which

one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is

unique in it and therefore inexpressible" (p. 6). In illustration, he

mentions self-knowledge: "there is one reality, at least, which we all

seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our

own personality in its flowing through time--our self which endures"

(p. 8). The rest of Bergson's philosophy consists in reporting, through

the imperfect medium of words, the knowledge gained by intuition, and

the consequent complete condemnation of all the pretended knowledge

derived from science and common sense.

[7] Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 1.

27
This procedure, since it takes sides in a conflict of instinctive

beliefs, stands in need of justification by proving the greater

trustworthiness of the beliefs on one side than of those on the other.

Bergson attempts this justification in two ways--first, by explaining

that intellect is a purely practical faculty designed to secure

biological success; secondly, by mentioning remarkable feats of instinct

in animals, and by pointing out characteristics of the world which,

though intuition can apprehend them, are baffling to intellect as he

interprets it.

Of Bergson's theory that intellect is a purely practical faculty

developed in the struggle for survival, and not a source of true

beliefs, we may say, first, that it is only through intellect that we

know of the struggle for survival and of the biological ancestry of man:

if the intellect is misleading, the whole of this merely inferred

history is presumably untrue. If, on the other hand, we agree with M.

Bergson in thinking that evolution took place as Darwin believed, then

it is not only intellect, but all our faculties, that have been

developed under the stress of practical utility. Intuition is seen at

its best where it is directly useful--for example, in regard to other

people's characters and dispositions. Bergson apparently holds that

capacity for this kind of knowledge is less explicable by the struggle

for existence than, for example, capacity for pure mathematics. Yet the

savage deceived by false friendship is likely to pay for his mistake

with his life; whereas even in the most civilised societies men are not

28
put to death for mathematical incompetence. All the most striking of his

instances of intuition in animals have a very direct survival value. The

fact is, of course, that both intuition and intellect have been

developed because they are useful, and that, speaking broadly, they are

useful when they give truth and become harmful when they give falsehood.

Intellect, in civilised man, like artistic capacity, has occasionally

been developed beyond the point where it is useful to the individual;

intuition, on the other hand, seems on the whole to diminish as

civilisation increases. Speaking broadly, it is greater in children than

in adults, in the uneducated than in the educated. Probably in dogs it

exceeds anything to be found in human beings. But those who find in

these facts a recommendation of intuition ought to return to running

wild in the woods, dyeing themselves with woad and living on hips and

haws.

Let us next examine whether intuition possesses any such infallibility

as Bergson claims for it. The best instance of it, according to him, is

our acquaintance with ourselves; yet self-knowledge is proverbially rare

and difficult. Most men, for example, have in their nature meannesses,

vanities, and envies of which they are quite unconscious, though even

their best friends can perceive them without any difficulty. It is true

that intuition has a convincingness which is lacking to intellect: while

it is present, it is almost impossible to doubt its truth. But if it

should appear, on examination, to be at least as fallible as intellect,

its greater subjective certainty becomes a demerit, making it only the

more irresistibly deceptive. Apart from self-knowledge, one of the most

29
notable examples of intuition is the knowledge people believe themselves

to possess of those with whom they are in love: the wall between

different personalities seems to become transparent, and people think

they see into another soul as into their own. Yet deception in such

cases is constantly practised with success; and even where there is no

intentional deception, experience gradually proves, as a rule, that the

supposed insight was illusory, and that the slower, more groping methods

of the intellect are in the long run more reliable.

Bergson maintains that intellect can only deal with things in so far as

they resemble what has been experienced in the past, while intuition has

the power of apprehending the uniqueness and novelty that always belong

to each fresh moment. That there is something unique and new at every

moment, is certainly true; it is also true that this cannot be fully

expressed by means of intellectual concepts. Only direct acquaintance

can give knowledge of what is unique and new. But direct acquaintance of

this kind is given fully in sensation, and does not require, so far as I

can see, any special faculty of intuition for its apprehension. It is

neither intellect nor intuition, but sensation, that supplies new data;

but when the data are new in any remarkable manner, intellect is much

more capable of dealing with them than intuition would be. The hen with

a brood of ducklings no doubt has intuitions which seem to place her

inside them, and not merely to know them analytically; but when the

ducklings take to the water, the whole apparent intuition is seen to be

illusory, and the hen is left helpless on the shore. Intuition, in fact,

is an aspect and development of instinct, and, like all instinct, is

30
admirable in those customary surroundings which have moulded the habits

of the animal in question, but totally incompetent as soon as the

surroundings are changed in a way which demands some non-habitual mode

of action.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of

philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or

to savages, or even to most civilised men. It is hardly to be supposed,

therefore, that the rapid, rough and ready methods of instinct or

intuition will find in this field a favourable ground for their

application. It is the older kinds of activity, which bring out our

kinship with remote generations of animal and semi-human ancestors, that

show intuition at its best. In such matters as self-preservation and

love, intuition will act sometimes (though not always) with a swiftness

and precision which are astonishing to the critical intellect. But

philosophy is not one of the pursuits which illustrate our affinity with

the past: it is a highly refined, highly civilised pursuit, demanding,

for its success, a certain liberation from the life of instinct, and

even, at times, a certain aloofness from all mundane hopes and fears. It

is not in philosophy, therefore, that we can hope to see intuition at

its best. On the contrary, since the true objects of philosophy, and the

habits of thought demanded for their apprehension, are strange, unusual,

and remote, it is here, more almost than anywhere else, that intellect

proves superior to intuition, and that quick unanalysed convictions are

least deserving of uncritical acceptance.

31
Before embarking upon the somewhat difficult and abstract discussions

which lie before us, it will be well to take a survey of the hopes we

may retain and the hopes we must abandon. The hope of satisfaction to

our more human desires--the hope of demonstrating that the world has

this or that desirable ethical characteristic--is not one which, so far

as I can see, philosophy can do anything whatever to satisfy. The

difference between a good world and a bad one is a difference in the

particular characteristics of the particular things that exist in these

worlds: it is not a sufficiently abstract difference to come within the

province of philosophy. Love and hate, for example, are ethical

opposites, but to philosophy they are closely analogous attitudes

towards objects. The general form and structure of those attitudes

towards objects which constitute mental phenomena is a problem for

philosophy; but the difference between love and hate is not a difference

of form or structure, and therefore belongs rather to the special

science of psychology than to philosophy. Thus the ethical interests

which have often inspired philosophers must remain in the background:

some kind of ethical interest may inspire the whole study, but none must

obtrude in the detail or be expected in the special results which are

sought.

If this view seems at first sight disappointing, we may remind ourselves

that a similar change has been found necessary in all the other

sciences. The physicist or chemist is not now required to prove the

ethical importance of his ions or atoms; the biologist is not expected

to prove the utility of the plants or animals which he dissects. In

32
pre-scientific ages this was not the case. Astronomy, for example, was

studied because men believed in astrology: it was thought that the

movements of the planets had the most direct and important bearing upon

the lives of human beings. Presumably, when this belief decayed and the

disinterested study of astronomy began, many who had found astrology

absorbingly interesting decided that astronomy had too little human

interest to be worthy of study. Physics, as it appears in Plato's

Timæus for example, is full of ethical notions: it is an essential

part of its purpose to show that the earth is worthy of admiration. The

modern physicist, on the contrary, though he has no wish to deny that

the earth is admirable, is not concerned, as physicist, with its ethical

attributes: he is merely concerned to find out facts, not to consider

whether they are good or bad. In psychology, the scientific attitude is

even more recent and more difficult than in the physical sciences: it is

natural to consider that human nature is either good or bad, and to

suppose that the difference between good and bad, so all-important in

practice, must be important in theory also. It is only during the last

century that an ethically neutral science of psychology has grown up;

and here too ethical neutrality has been essential to scientific

success.

In philosophy, hitherto, ethical neutrality has been seldom sought and

hardly ever achieved. Men have remembered their wishes, and have judged

philosophies in relation to their wishes. Driven from the particular

sciences, the belief that the notions of good and evil must afford a key

to the understanding of the world has sought a refuge in philosophy. But

33
even from this last refuge, if philosophy is not to remain a set of

pleasing dreams, this belief must be driven forth. It is a commonplace

that happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly; and

it would seem that the same is true of the good. In thought, at any

rate, those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are

more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the

distorting medium of their own desires.

The immense extension of our knowledge of facts in recent times has had,

as it had in the Renaissance, two effects upon the general intellectual

outlook. On the one hand, it has made men distrustful of the truth of

wide, ambitious systems: theories come and go swiftly, each serving, for

a moment, to classify known facts and promote the search for new ones,

but each in turn proving inadequate to deal with the new facts when they

have been found. Even those who invent the theories do not, in science,

regard them as anything but a temporary makeshift. The ideal of an

all-embracing synthesis, such as the Middle Ages believed themselves to

have attained, recedes further and further beyond the limits of what

seems feasible. In such a world, as in the world of Montaigne, nothing

seems worth while except the discovery of more and more facts, each in

turn the deathblow to some cherished theory; the ordering intellect

grows weary, and becomes slovenly through despair.

On the other hand, the new facts have brought new powers; man's physical

control over natural forces has been increasing with unexampled

rapidity, and promises to increase in the future beyond all easily

34
assignable limits. Thus alongside of despair as regards ultimate theory

there is an immense optimism as regards practice: what man can do

seems almost boundless. The old fixed limits of human power, such as

death, or the dependence of the race on an equilibrium of cosmic forces,

are forgotten, and no hard facts are allowed to break in upon the dream

of omnipotence. No philosophy is tolerated which sets bounds to man's

capacity of gratifying his wishes; and thus the very despair of theory

is invoked to silence every whisper of doubt as regards the

possibilities of practical achievement.

In the welcoming of new fact, and in the suspicion of dogmatism as

regards the universe at large, the modern spirit should, I think, be

accepted as wholly an advance. But both in its practical pretensions and

in its theoretical despair it seems to me to go too far. Most of what is

greatest in man is called forth in response to the thwarting of his

hopes by immutable natural obstacles; by the pretence of omnipotence, he

becomes trivial and a little absurd. And on the theoretical side,

ultimate metaphysical truth, though less all-embracing and harder of

attainment than it appeared to some philosophers in the past, can, I

believe, be discovered by those who are willing to combine the

hopefulness, patience, and open-mindedness of science with something of

the Greek feeling for beauty in the abstract world of logic and for the

ultimate intrinsic value in the contemplation of truth.

The philosophy, therefore, which is to be genuinely inspired by the

scientific spirit, must deal with somewhat dry and abstract matters, and

35
must not hope to find an answer to the practical problems of life. To

those who wish to understand much of what has in the past been most

difficult and obscure in the constitution of the universe, it has great

rewards to offer--triumphs as noteworthy as those of Newton and Darwin,

and as important in the long run, for the moulding of our mental habits.

And it brings with it--as a new and powerful method of investigation

always does--a sense of power and a hope of progress more reliable and

better grounded than any that rests on hasty and fallacious

generalisation as to the nature of the universe at large. Many hopes

which inspired philosophers in the past it cannot claim to fulfil; but

other hopes, more purely intellectual, it can satisfy more fully than

former ages could have deemed possible for human minds.

36
LECTURE II

LOGIC AS THE ESSENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

The topics we discussed in our first lecture, and the topics we shall

discuss later, all reduce themselves, in so far as they are genuinely

philosophical, to problems of logic. This is not due to any accident,

but to the fact that every philosophical problem, when it is subjected

to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either to be not

really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are

using the word, logical. But as the word "logic" is never used in the

same sense by two different philosophers, some explanation of what I

mean by the word is indispensable at the outset.

Logic, in the Middle Ages, and down to the present day in teaching,

meant no more than a scholastic collection of technical terms and rules

of syllogistic inference. Aristotle had spoken, and it was the part of

humbler men merely to repeat the lesson after him. The trivial nonsense

embodied in this tradition is still set in examinations, and defended by

eminent authorities as an excellent "propædeutic," i.e. a training in

those habits of solemn humbug which are so great a help in later life.

But it is not this that I mean to praise in saying that all philosophy

is logic. Ever since the beginning of the seventeenth century, all

vigorous minds that have concerned themselves with inference have

abandoned the mediæval tradition, and in one way or other have widened

37
the scope of logic.

The first extension was the introduction of the inductive method by

Bacon and Galileo--by the former in a theoretical and largely mistaken

form, by the latter in actual use in establishing the foundations of

modern physics and astronomy. This is probably the only extension of the

old logic which has become familiar to the general educated public. But

induction, important as it is when regarded as a method of

investigation, does not seem to remain when its work is done: in the

final form of a perfected science, it would seem that everything ought

to be deductive. If induction remains at all, which is a difficult

question, it will remain merely as one of the principles according to

which deductions are effected. Thus the ultimate result of the

introduction of the inductive method seems not the creation of a new

kind of non-deductive reasoning, but rather the widening of the scope of

deduction by pointing out a way of deducing which is certainly not

syllogistic, and does not fit into the mediæval scheme.

The question of the scope and validity of induction is of great

difficulty, and of great importance to our knowledge. Take such a

question as, "Will the sun rise to-morrow?" Our first instinctive

feeling is that we have abundant reason for saying that it will, because

it has risen on so many previous mornings. Now, I do not myself know

whether this does afford a ground or not, but I am willing to suppose

that it does. The question which then arises is: What is the principle

of inference by which we pass from past sunrises to future ones? The

38
answer given by Mill is that the inference depends upon the law of

causation. Let us suppose this to be true; then what is the reason for

believing in the law of causation? There are broadly three possible

answers: (1) that it is itself known a priori; (2) that it is a

postulate; (3) that it is an empirical generalisation from past

instances in which it has been found to hold. The theory that causation

is known a priori cannot be definitely refuted, but it can be rendered

very unplausible by the mere process of formulating the law exactly, and

thereby showing that it is immensely more complicated and less obvious

than is generally supposed. The theory that causation is a postulate,

i.e. that it is something which we choose to assert although we know

that it is very likely false, is also incapable of refutation; but it is

plainly also incapable of justifying any use of the law in inference. We

are thus brought to the theory that the law is an empirical

generalisation, which is the view held by Mill.

But if so, how are empirical generalisations to be justified? The

evidence in their favour cannot be empirical, since we wish to argue

from what has been observed to what has not been observed, which can

only be done by means of some known relation of the observed and the

unobserved; but the unobserved, by definition, is not known empirically,

and therefore its relation to the observed, if known at all, must be

known independently of empirical evidence. Let us see what Mill says on

this subject.

According to Mill, the law of causation is proved by an admittedly

39
fallible process called "induction by simple enumeration." This process,

he says, "consists in ascribing the nature of general truths to all

propositions which are true in every instance that we happen to know

of."[8] As regards its fallibility, he asserts that "the precariousness

of the method of simple enumeration is in an inverse ratio to the

largeness of the generalisation. The process is delusive and

insufficient, exactly in proportion as the subject-matter of the

observation is special and limited in extent. As the sphere widens, this

unscientific method becomes less and less liable to mislead; and the

most universal class of truths, the law of causation for instance, and

the principles of number and of geometry, are duly and satisfactorily

proved by that method alone, nor are they susceptible of any other

proof."[9]

[8] Logic, book iii., chapter iii., § 2.

[9] Book iii., chapter xxi., § 3.

In the above statement, there are two obvious lacunæ: (1) How is the

method of simple enumeration itself justified? (2) What logical

principle, if any, covers the same ground as this method, without being

liable to its failures? Let us take the second question first.

A method of proof which, when used as directed, gives sometimes truth

and sometimes falsehood--as the method of simple enumeration does--is

obviously not a valid method, for validity demands invariable truth.

40
Thus, if simple enumeration is to be rendered valid, it must not be

stated as Mill states it. We shall have to say, at most, that the data

render the result probable. Causation holds, we shall say, in every

instance we have been able to test; therefore it probably holds in

untested instances. There are terrible difficulties in the notion of

probability, but we may ignore them at present. We thus have what at

least may be a logical principle, since it is without exception. If a

proposition is true in every instance that we happen to know of, and if

the instances are very numerous, then, we shall say, it becomes very

probable, on the data, that it will be true in any further instance.

This is not refuted by the fact that what we declare to be probable does

not always happen, for an event may be probable on the data and yet not

occur. It is, however, obviously capable of further analysis, and of

more exact statement. We shall have to say something like this: that

every instance of a proposition[10] being true increases the probability

of its being true in a fresh instance, and that a sufficient number of

favourable instances will, in the absence of instances to the contrary,

make the probability of the truth of a fresh instance approach

indefinitely near to certainty. Some such principle as this is required

if the method of simple enumeration is to be valid.

[10] Or rather a propositional function.

But this brings us to our other question, namely, how is our principle

known to be true? Obviously, since it is required to justify induction,

it cannot be proved by induction; since it goes beyond the empirical

41
data, it cannot be proved by them alone; since it is required to justify

all inferences from empirical data to what goes beyond them, it cannot

itself be even rendered in any degree probable by such data. Hence, if

it is known, it is not known by experience, but independently of

experience. I do not say that any such principle is known: I only say

that it is required to justify the inferences from experience which

empiricists allow, and that it cannot itself be justified

empirically.[11]

[11] The subject of causality and induction will be discussed again in

Lecture VIII.

A similar conclusion can be proved by similar arguments concerning any

other logical principle. Thus logical knowledge is not derivable from

experience alone, and the empiricist's philosophy can therefore not be

accepted in its entirety, in spite of its excellence in many matters

which lie outside logic.

Hegel and his followers widened the scope of logic in quite a different

way--a way which I believe to be fallacious, but which requires

discussion if only to show how their conception of logic differs from

the conception which I wish to advocate. In their writings, logic is

practically identical with metaphysics. In broad outline, the way this

came about is as follows. Hegel believed that, by means of a priori

reasoning, it could be shown that the world must have various

important and interesting characteristics, since any world without these

42
characteristics would be impossible and self-contradictory. Thus what he

calls "logic" is an investigation of the nature of the universe, in so

far as this can be inferred merely from the principle that the universe

must be logically self-consistent. I do not myself believe that from

this principle alone anything of importance can be inferred as regards

the existing universe. But, however that may be, I should not regard

Hegel's reasoning, even if it were valid, as properly belonging to

logic: it would rather be an application of logic to the actual world.

Logic itself would be concerned rather with such questions as what

self-consistency is, which Hegel, so far as I know, does not discuss.

And though he criticises the traditional logic, and professes to replace

it by an improved logic of his own, there is some sense in which the

traditional logic, with all its faults, is uncritically and

unconsciously assumed throughout his reasoning. It is not in the

direction advocated by him, it seems to me, that the reform of logic is

to be sought, but by a more fundamental, more patient, and less

ambitious investigation into the presuppositions which his system shares

with those of most other philosophers.

The way in which, as it seems to me, Hegel's system assumes the ordinary

logic which it subsequently criticises, is exemplified by the general

conception of "categories" with which he operates throughout. This

conception is, I think, essentially a product of logical confusion, but

it seems in some way to stand for the conception of "qualities of

Reality as a whole." Mr Bradley has worked out a theory according to

which, in all judgment, we are ascribing a predicate to Reality as a

43
whole; and this theory is derived from Hegel. Now the traditional logic

holds that every proposition ascribes a predicate to a subject, and from

this it easily follows that there can be only one subject, the Absolute,

for if there were two, the proposition that there were two would not

ascribe a predicate to either. Thus Hegel's doctrine, that philosophical

propositions must be of the form, "the Absolute is such-and-such,"

depends upon the traditional belief in the universality of the

subject-predicate form. This belief, being traditional, scarcely

self-conscious, and not supposed to be important, operates underground,

and is assumed in arguments which, like the refutation of relations,

appear at first sight such as to establish its truth. This is the most

important respect in which Hegel uncritically assumes the traditional

logic. Other less important respects--though important enough to be the

source of such essentially Hegelian conceptions as the "concrete

universal" and the "union of identity in difference"--will be found

where he explicitly deals with formal logic.[12]

[12] See the translation by H. S. Macran, Hegel's Doctrine of Formal

Logic, Oxford, 1912. Hegel's argument in this portion of his "Logic"

depends throughout upon confusing the "is" of predication, as in

"Socrates is mortal," with the "is" of identity, as in "Socrates is

the philosopher who drank the hemlock." Owing to this confusion, he

thinks that "Socrates" and "mortal" must be identical. Seeing that

they are different, he does not infer, as others would, that there is

a mistake somewhere, but that they exhibit "identity in difference."

Again, Socrates is particular, "mortal" is universal. Therefore, he

44
 says, since Socrates is mortal, it follows that the particular is the

universal--taking the "is" to be throughout expressive of identity.

But to say "the particular is the universal" is self-contradictory.

Again Hegel does not suspect a mistake but proceeds to synthesise

particular and universal in the individual, or concrete universal.

This is an example of how, for want of care at the start, vast and

imposing systems of philosophy are built upon stupid and trivial

confusions, which, but for the almost incredible fact that they are

unintentional, one would be tempted to characterise as puns.

There is quite another direction in which a large technical development

of logic has taken place: I mean the direction of what is called

logistic or mathematical logic. This kind of logic is mathematical in

two different senses: it is itself a branch of mathematics, and it is

the logic which is specially applicable to other more traditional

branches of mathematics. Historically, it began as merely a branch of

mathematics: its special applicability to other branches is a more

recent development. In both respects, it is the fulfilment of a hope

which Leibniz cherished throughout his life, and pursued with all the

ardour of his amazing intellectual energy. Much of his work on this

subject has been published recently, since his discoveries have been

remade by others; but none was published by him, because his results

persisted in contradicting certain points in the traditional doctrine of

the syllogism. We now know that on these points the traditional doctrine

is wrong, but respect for Aristotle prevented Leibniz from realising

that this was possible.[13]

45
 [13] Cf. Couturat, La Logique de Leibniz, pp. 361, 386.

The modern development of mathematical logic dates from Boole's Laws of

Thought (1854). But in him and his successors, before Peano and Frege,

the only thing really achieved, apart from certain details, was the

invention of a mathematical symbolism for deducing consequences from the

premisses which the newer methods shared with those of Aristotle. This

subject has considerable interest as an independent branch of

mathematics, but it has very little to do with real logic. The first

serious advance in real logic since the time of the Greeks was made

independently by Peano and Frege--both mathematicians. They both arrived

at their logical results by an analysis of mathematics. Traditional

logic regarded the two propositions, "Socrates is mortal" and "All men

are mortal," as being of the same form;[14] Peano and Frege showed that

they are utterly different in form. The philosophical importance of

logic may be illustrated by the fact that this confusion--which is still

committed by most writers--obscured not only the whole study of the

forms of judgment and inference, but also the relations of things to

their qualities, of concrete existence to abstract concepts, and of the

world of sense to the world of Platonic ideas. Peano and Frege, who

pointed out the error, did so for technical reasons, and applied their

logic mainly to technical developments; but the philosophical importance

of the advance which they made is impossible to exaggerate.

[14] It was often recognised that there was some difference between

46
 them, but it was not recognised that the difference is fundamental,

and of very great importance.

Mathematical logic, even in its most modern form, is not directly of

philosophical importance except in its beginnings. After the beginnings,

it belongs rather to mathematics than to philosophy. Of its beginnings,

which are the only part of it that can properly be called

philosophical logic, I shall speak shortly. But even the later

developments, though not directly philosophical, will be found of great

indirect use in philosophising. They enable us to deal easily with more

abstract conceptions than merely verbal reasoning can enumerate; they

suggest fruitful hypotheses which otherwise could hardly be thought of;

and they enable us to see quickly what is the smallest store of

materials with which a given logical or scientific edifice can be

constructed. Not only Frege's theory of number, which we shall deal with

in Lecture VII., but the whole theory of physical concepts which will be

outlined in our next two lectures, is inspired by mathematical logic,

and could never have been imagined without it.

In both these cases, and in many others, we shall appeal to a certain

principle called "the principle of abstraction." This principle, which

might equally well be called "the principle which dispenses with

abstraction," and is one which clears away incredible accumulations of

metaphysical lumber, was directly suggested by mathematical logic, and

could hardly have been proved or practically used without its help. The

principle will be explained in our fourth lecture, but its use may be

47
briefly indicated in advance. When a group of objects have that kind of

similarity which we are inclined to attribute to possession of a common

quality, the principle in question shows that membership of the group

will serve all the purposes of the supposed common quality, and that

therefore, unless some common quality is actually known, the group or

class of similar objects may be used to replace the common quality,

which need not be assumed to exist. In this and other ways, the indirect

uses of even the later parts of mathematical logic are very great; but

it is now time to turn our attention to its philosophical foundations.

In every proposition and in every inference there is, besides the

particular subject-matter concerned, a certain form, a way in which

the constituents of the proposition or inference are put together. If I

say, "Socrates is mortal," "Jones is angry," "The sun is hot," there is

something in common in these three cases, something indicated by the

word "is." What is in common is the form of the proposition, not an

actual constituent. If I say a number of things about Socrates--that he

was an Athenian, that he married Xantippe, that he drank the

hemlock--there is a common constituent, namely Socrates, in all the

propositions I enunciate, but they have diverse forms. If, on the other

hand, I take any one of these propositions and replace its constituents,

one at a time, by other constituents, the form remains constant, but no

constituent remains. Take (say) the series of propositions, "Socrates

drank the hemlock," "Coleridge drank the hemlock," "Coleridge drank

opium," "Coleridge ate opium." The form remains unchanged throughout

this series, but all the constituents are altered. Thus form is not

48
another constituent, but is the way the constituents are put together.

It is forms, in this sense, that are the proper object of philosophical

logic.

It is obvious that the knowledge of logical forms is something quite

different from knowledge of existing things. The form of "Socrates drank

the hemlock" is not an existing thing like Socrates or the hemlock, nor

does it even have that close relation to existing things that drinking

has. It is something altogether more abstract and remote. We might

understand all the separate words of a sentence without understanding

the sentence: if a sentence is long and complicated, this is apt to

happen. In such a case we have knowledge of the constituents, but not of

the form. We may also have knowledge of the form without having

knowledge of the constituents. If I say, "Rorarius drank the hemlock,"

those among you who have never heard of Rorarius (supposing there are

any) will understand the form, without having knowledge of all the

constituents. In order to understand a sentence, it is necessary to have

knowledge both of the constituents and of the particular instance of the

form. It is in this way that a sentence conveys information, since it

tells us that certain known objects are related according to a certain

known form. Thus some kind of knowledge of logical forms, though with

most people it is not explicit, is involved in all understanding of

discourse. It is the business of philosophical logic to extract this

knowledge from its concrete integuments, and to render it explicit and

pure.

49
In all inference, form alone is essential: the particular subject-matter

is irrelevant except as securing the truth of the premisses. This is one

reason for the great importance of logical form. When I say, "Socrates

was a man, all men are mortal, therefore Socrates was mortal," the

connection of premisses and conclusion does not in any way depend upon

its being Socrates and man and mortality that I am mentioning. The

general form of the inference may be expressed in some such words as,

"If a thing has a certain property, and whatever has this property has a

certain other property, then the thing in question also has that other

property." Here no particular things or properties are mentioned: the

proposition is absolutely general. All inferences, when stated fully,

are instances of propositions having this kind of generality. If they

seem to depend upon the subject-matter otherwise than as regards the

truth of the premisses, that is because the premisses have not been all

explicitly stated. In logic, it is a waste of time to deal with

inferences concerning particular cases: we deal throughout with

completely general and purely formal implications, leaving it to other

sciences to discover when the hypotheses are verified and when they are

not.

But the forms of propositions giving rise to inferences are not the

simplest forms: they are always hypothetical, stating that if one

proposition is true, then so is another. Before considering inference,

therefore, logic must consider those simpler forms which inference

presupposes. Here the traditional logic failed completely: it believed

that there was only one form of simple proposition (i.e. of

50
proposition not stating a relation between two or more other

propositions), namely, the form which ascribes a predicate to a subject.

This is the appropriate form in assigning the qualities of a given

thing--we may say "this thing is round, and red, and so on." Grammar

favours this form, but philosophically it is so far from universal that

it is not even very common. If we say "this thing is bigger than that,"

we are not assigning a mere quality of "this," but a relation of "this"

and "that." We might express the same fact by saying "that thing is

smaller than this," where grammatically the subject is changed. Thus

propositions stating that two things have a certain relation have a

different form from subject-predicate propositions, and the failure to

perceive this difference or to allow for it has been the source of many

errors in traditional metaphysics.

The belief or unconscious conviction that all propositions are of the

subject-predicate form--in other words, that every fact consists in some

thing having some quality--has rendered most philosophers incapable of

giving any account of the world of science and daily life. If they had

been honestly anxious to give such an account, they would probably have

discovered their error very quickly; but most of them were less anxious

to understand the world of science and daily life, than to convict it of

unreality in the interests of a super-sensible "real" world. Belief in

the unreality of the world of sense arises with irresistible force in

certain moods--moods which, I imagine, have some simple physiological

basis, but are none the less powerfully persuasive. The conviction born

of these moods is the source of most mysticism and of most metaphysics.

51
When the emotional intensity of such a mood subsides, a man who is in

the habit of reasoning will search for logical reasons in favour of the

belief which he finds in himself. But since the belief already exists,

he will be very hospitable to any reason that suggests itself. The

paradoxes apparently proved by his logic are really the paradoxes of

mysticism, and are the goal which he feels his logic must reach if it is

to be in accordance with insight. It is in this way that logic has been

pursued by those of the great philosophers who were mystics--notably

Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel. But since they usually took for granted the

supposed insight of the mystic emotion, their logical doctrines were

presented with a certain dryness, and were believed by their disciples

to be quite independent of the sudden illumination from which they

sprang. Nevertheless their origin clung to them, and they remained--to

borrow a useful word from Mr Santayana--"malicious" in regard to the

world of science and common sense. It is only so that we can account for

the complacency with which philosophers have accepted the inconsistency

of their doctrines with all the common and scientific facts which seem

best established and most worthy of belief.

The logic of mysticism shows, as is natural, the defects which are

inherent in anything malicious. While the mystic mood is dominant, the

need of logic is not felt; as the mood fades, the impulse to logic

reasserts itself, but with a desire to retain the vanishing insight, or

at least to prove that it was insight, and that what seems to

contradict it is illusion. The logic which thus arises is not quite

disinterested or candid, and is inspired by a certain hatred of the

52
daily world to which it is to be applied. Such an attitude naturally

does not tend to the best results. Everyone knows that to read an author

simply in order to refute him is not the way to understand him; and to

read the book of Nature with a conviction that it is all illusion is

just as unlikely to lead to understanding. If our logic is to find the

common world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired

by a genuine acceptance such as is not usually to be found among

metaphysicians.

Traditional logic, since it holds that all propositions have the

subject-predicate form, is unable to admit the reality of relations: all

relations, it maintains, must be reduced to properties of the apparently

related terms. There are many ways of refuting this opinion; one of the

easiest is derived from the consideration of what are called

"asymmetrical" relations. In order to explain this, I will first explain

two independent ways of classifying relations.

Some relations, when they hold between A and B, also hold between B and

A. Such, for example, is the relation "brother or sister." If A is a

brother or sister of B, then B is a brother or sister of A. Such again

is any kind of similarity, say similarity of colour. Any kind of

dissimilarity is also of this kind: if the colour of A is unlike the

colour of B, then the colour of B is unlike the colour of A. Relations

of this sort are called symmetrical. Thus a relation is symmetrical

if, whenever it holds between A and B, it also holds between B and A.

53
All relations that are not symmetrical are called non-symmetrical.

Thus "brother" is non-symmetrical, because, if A is a brother of B, it

may happen that B is a sister of A.

A relation is called asymmetrical when, if it holds between A and B,

it never holds between B and A. Thus husband, father, grandfather,

etc., are asymmetrical relations. So are before, after, greater,

above, to the right of, etc. All the relations that give rise to

series are of this kind.

Classification into symmetrical, asymmetrical, and merely

non-symmetrical relations is the first of the two classifications we had

to consider. The second is into transitive, intransitive, and merely

non-transitive relations, which are defined as follows.

A relation is said to be transitive, if, whenever it holds between A

and B and also between B and C, it holds between A and C. Thus before,

after, greater, above are transitive. All relations giving rise to

series are transitive, but so are many others. The transitive relations

just mentioned were asymmetrical, but many transitive relations are

symmetrical--for instance, equality in any respect, exact identity of

colour, being equally numerous (as applied to collections), and so on.

A relation is said to be non-transitive whenever it is not transitive.

Thus "brother" is non-transitive, because a brother of one's brother may

be oneself. All kinds of dissimilarity are non-transitive.

54
A relation is said to be intransitive when, if A has the relation to

B, and B to C, A never has it to C. Thus "father" is intransitive. So is

such a relation as "one inch taller" or "one year later."

Let us now, in the light of this classification, return to the question

whether all relations can be reduced to predications.

In the case of symmetrical relations--i.e. relations which, if they

hold between A and B, also hold between B and A--some kind of

plausibility can be given to this doctrine. A symmetrical relation which

is transitive, such as equality, can be regarded as expressing

possession of some common property, while one which is not transitive,

such as inequality, can be regarded as expressing possession of

different properties. But when we come to asymmetrical relations, such

as before and after, greater and less, etc., the attempt to reduce them

to properties becomes obviously impossible. When, for example, two

things are merely known to be unequal, without our knowing which is

greater, we may say that the inequality results from their having

different magnitudes, because inequality is a symmetrical relation; but

to say that when one thing is greater than another, and not merely

unequal to it, that means that they have different magnitudes, is

formally incapable of explaining the facts. For if the other thing had

been greater than the one, the magnitudes would also have been

different, though the fact to be explained would not have been the same.

Thus mere difference of magnitude is not all that is involved,

55
since, if it were, there would be no difference between one thing being

greater than another, and the other being greater than the one. We shall

have to say that the one magnitude is greater than the other, and thus

we shall have failed to get rid of the relation "greater." In short,

both possession of the same property and possession of different

properties are symmetrical relations, and therefore cannot account for

the existence of asymmetrical relations.

Asymmetrical relations are involved in all series--in space and time,

greater and less, whole and part, and many others of the most important

characteristics of the actual world. All these aspects, therefore, the

logic which reduces everything to subjects and predicates is compelled

to condemn as error and mere appearance. To those whose logic is not

malicious, such a wholesale condemnation appears impossible. And in fact

there is no reason except prejudice, so far as I can discover, for

denying the reality of relations. When once their reality is admitted,

all logical grounds for supposing the world of sense to be illusory

disappear. If this is to be supposed, it must be frankly and simply on

the ground of mystic insight unsupported by argument. It is impossible

to argue against what professes to be insight, so long as it does not

argue in its own favour. As logicians, therefore, we may admit the

possibility of the mystic's world, while yet, so long as we do not have

his insight, we must continue to study the everyday world with which we

are familiar. But when he contends that our world is impossible, then

our logic is ready to repel his attack. And the first step in creating

the logic which is to perform this service is the recognition of the

56
reality of relations.

Relations which have two terms are only one kind of relations. A

relation may have three terms, or four, or any number. Relations of two

terms, being the simplest, have received more attention than the others,

and have generally been alone considered by philosophers, both those who

accepted and those who denied the reality of relations. But other

relations have their importance, and are indispensable in the solution

of certain problems. Jealousy, for example, is a relation between three

people. Professor Royce mentions the relation "giving": when A gives B

to C, that is a relation of three terms.[15] When a man says to his

wife: "My dear, I wish you could induce Angelina to accept Edwin," his

wish constitutes a relation between four people, himself, his wife,

Angelina, and Edwin. Thus such relations are by no means recondite or

rare. But in order to explain exactly how they differ from relations of

two terms, we must embark upon a classification of the logical forms of

facts, which is the first business of logic, and the business in which

the traditional logic has been most deficient.

[15] Encyclopædia of the Philosophical Sciences, vol. i. p. 97.

The existing world consists of many things with many qualities and

relations. A complete description of the existing world would require

not only a catalogue of the things, but also a mention of all their

qualities and relations. We should have to know not only this, that, and

the other thing, but also which was red, which yellow, which was earlier

57
than which, which was between which two others, and so on. When I speak

of a "fact," I do not mean one of the simple things in the world; I mean

that a certain thing has a certain quality, or that certain things have

a certain relation. Thus, for example, I should not call Napoleon a

fact, but I should call it a fact that he was ambitious, or that he

married Josephine. Now a fact, in this sense, is never simple, but

always has two or more constituents. When it simply assigns a quality to

a thing, it has only two constituents, the thing and the quality. When

it consists of a relation between two things, it has three constituents,

the things and the relation. When it consists of a relation between

three things, it has four constituents, and so on. The constituents of

facts, in the sense in which we are using the word "fact," are not other

facts, but are things and qualities or relations. When we say that there

are relations of more than two terms, we mean that there are single

facts consisting of a single relation and more than two things. I do not

mean that one relation of two terms may hold between A and B, and also

between A and C, as, for example, a man is the son of his father and

also the son of his mother. This constitutes two distinct facts: if we

choose to treat it as one fact, it is a fact which has facts for its

constituents. But the facts I am speaking of have no facts among their

constituents, but only things and relations. For example, when A is

jealous of B on account of C, there is only one fact, involving three

people; there are not two instances of jealousy, but only one. It is in

such cases that I speak of a relation of three terms, where the simplest

possible fact in which the relation occurs is one involving three things

in addition to the relation. And the same applies to relations of four

58
terms or five or any other number. All such relations must be admitted

in our inventory of the logical forms of facts: two facts involving the

same number of things have the same form, and two which involve

different numbers of things have different forms.

Given any fact, there is an assertion which expresses the fact. The fact

itself is objective, and independent of our thought or opinion about it;

but the assertion is something which involves thought, and may be either

true or false. An assertion may be positive or negative: we may assert

that Charles I. was executed, or that he did not die in his bed. A

negative assertion may be said to be a denial. Given a form of words

which must be either true or false, such as "Charles I. died in his

bed," we may either assert or deny this form of words: in the one case

we have a positive assertion, in the other a negative one. A form of

words which must be either true or false I shall call a proposition.

Thus a proposition is the same as what may be significantly asserted or

denied. A proposition which expresses what we have called a fact, i.e.

which, when asserted, asserts that a certain thing has a certain

quality, or that certain things have a certain relation, will be called

an atomic proposition, because, as we shall see immediately, there are

other propositions into which atomic propositions enter in a way

analogous to that in which atoms enter into molecules. Atomic

propositions, although, like facts, they may have any one of an infinite

number of forms, are only one kind of propositions. All other kinds are

more complicated. In order to preserve the parallelism in language as

regards facts and propositions, we shall give the name "atomic facts" to

59
the facts we have hitherto been considering. Thus atomic facts are what

determine whether atomic propositions are to be asserted or denied.

Whether an atomic proposition, such as "this is red," or "this is before

that," is to be asserted or denied can only be known empirically.

Perhaps one atomic fact may sometimes be capable of being inferred from

another, though this seems very doubtful; but in any case it cannot be

inferred from premisses no one of which is an atomic fact. It follows

that, if atomic facts are to be known at all, some at least must be

known without inference. The atomic facts which we come to know in this

way are the facts of sense-perception; at any rate, the facts of

sense-perception are those which we most obviously and certainly come to

know in this way. If we knew all atomic facts, and also knew that there

were none except those we knew, we should, theoretically, be able to

infer all truths of whatever form.[16] Thus logic would then supply us

with the whole of the apparatus required. But in the first acquisition

of knowledge concerning atomic facts, logic is useless. In pure logic,

no atomic fact is ever mentioned: we confine ourselves wholly to forms,

without asking ourselves what objects can fill the forms. Thus pure

logic is independent of atomic facts; but conversely, they are, in a

sense, independent of logic. Pure logic and atomic facts are the two

poles, the wholly a priori and the wholly empirical. But between the

two lies a vast intermediate region, which we must now briefly explore.

[16] This perhaps requires modification in order to include such facts

as beliefs and wishes, since such facts apparently contain

60
 propositions as components. Such facts, though not strictly atomic,

must be supposed included if the statement in the text is to be true.

"Molecular" propositions are such as contain conjunctions--if, or,

and, unless, etc.--and such words are the marks of a molecular

proposition. Consider such an assertion as, "If it rains, I shall bring

my umbrella." This assertion is just as capable of truth or falsehood as

the assertion of an atomic proposition, but it is obvious that either

the corresponding fact, or the nature of the correspondence with fact,

must be quite different from what it is in the case of an atomic

proposition. Whether it rains, and whether I bring my umbrella, are each

severally matters of atomic fact, ascertainable by observation. But the

connection of the two involved in saying that if the one happens,

then the other will happen, is something radically different from

either of the two separately. It does not require for its truth that it

should actually rain, or that I should actually bring my umbrella; even

if the weather is cloudless, it may still be true that I should have

brought my umbrella if the weather had been different. Thus we have here

a connection of two propositions, which does not depend upon whether

they are to be asserted or denied, but only upon the second being

inferable from the first. Such propositions, therefore, have a form

which is different from that of any atomic proposition.

Such propositions are important to logic, because all inference depends

upon them. If I have told you that if it rains I shall bring my

umbrella, and if you see that there is a steady downpour, you can infer

61
that I shall bring my umbrella. There can be no inference except where

propositions are connected in some such way, so that from the truth or

falsehood of the one something follows as to the truth or falsehood of

the other. It seems to be the case that we can sometimes know molecular

propositions, as in the above instance of the umbrella, when we do not

know whether the component atomic propositions are true or false. The

practical utility of inference rests upon this fact.

The next kind of propositions we have to consider are general

propositions, such as "all men are mortal," "all equilateral triangles

are equiangular." And with these belong propositions in which the word

"some" occurs, such as "some men are philosophers" or "some philosophers

are not wise." These are the denials of general propositions, namely (in

the above instances), of "all men are non-philosophers" and "all

philosophers are wise." We will call propositions containing the word

"some" negative general propositions, and those containing the word

"all" positive general propositions. These propositions, it will be

seen, begin to have the appearance of the propositions in logical

text-books. But their peculiarity and complexity are not known to the

text-books, and the problems which they raise are only discussed in the

most superficial manner.

When we were discussing atomic facts, we saw that we should be able,

theoretically, to infer all other truths by logic if we knew all atomic

facts and also knew that there were no other atomic facts besides those

we knew. The knowledge that there are no other atomic facts is positive

62
general knowledge; it is the knowledge that "all atomic facts are known

to me," or at least "all atomic facts are in this collection"--however

the collection may be given. It is easy to see that general

propositions, such as "all men are mortal," cannot be known by inference

from atomic facts alone. If we could know each individual man, and know

that he was mortal, that would not enable us to know that all men are

mortal, unless we knew that those were all the men there are, which is

a general proposition. If we knew every other existing thing throughout

the universe, and knew that each separate thing was not an immortal man,

that would not give us our result unless we knew that we had explored

the whole universe, i.e. unless we knew "all things belong to this

collection of things I have examined." Thus general truths cannot be

inferred from particular truths alone, but must, if they are to be

known, be either self-evident, or inferred from premisses of which at

least one is a general truth. But all empirical evidence is of

particular truths. Hence, if there is any knowledge of general truths

at all, there must be some knowledge of general truths which is

independent of empirical evidence, i.e. does not depend upon the data

of sense.

The above conclusion, of which we had an instance in the case of the

inductive principle, is important, since it affords a refutation of the

older empiricists. They believed that all our knowledge is derived from

the senses and dependent upon them. We see that, if this view is to be

maintained, we must refuse to admit that we know any general

propositions. It is perfectly possible logically that this should be the

63
case, but it does not appear to be so in fact, and indeed no one would

dream of maintaining such a view except a theorist at the last

extremity. We must therefore admit that there is general knowledge not

derived from sense, and that some of this knowledge is not obtained by

inference but is primitive.

Such general knowledge is to be found in logic. Whether there is any

such knowledge not derived from logic, I do not know; but in logic, at

any rate, we have such knowledge. It will be remembered that we excluded

from pure logic such propositions as, "Socrates is a man, all men are

mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal," because Socrates and man and

mortal are empirical terms, only to be understood through particular

experience. The corresponding proposition in pure logic is: "If anything

has a certain property, and whatever has this property has a certain

other property, then the thing in question has the other property." This

proposition is absolutely general: it applies to all things and all

properties. And it is quite self-evident. Thus in such propositions of

pure logic we have the self-evident general propositions of which we

were in search.

A proposition such as, "If Socrates is a man, and all men are mortal,

then Socrates is mortal," is true in virtue of its form alone. Its

truth, in this hypothetical form, does not depend upon whether Socrates

actually is a man, nor upon whether in fact all men are mortal; thus it

is equally true when we substitute other terms for Socrates and man

and mortal. The general truth of which it is an instance is purely

64
formal, and belongs to logic. Since it does not mention any particular

thing, or even any particular quality or relation, it is wholly

independent of the accidental facts of the existent world, and can be

known, theoretically, without any experience of particular things or

their qualities and relations.

Logic, we may say, consists of two parts. The first part investigates

what propositions are and what forms they may have; this part enumerates

the different kinds of atomic propositions, of molecular propositions,

of general propositions, and so on. The second part consists of certain

supremely general propositions, which assert the truth of all

propositions of certain forms. This second part merges into pure

mathematics, whose propositions all turn out, on analysis, to be such

general formal truths. The first part, which merely enumerates forms, is

the more difficult, and philosophically the more important; and it is

the recent progress in this first part, more than anything else, that

has rendered a truly scientific discussion of many philosophical

problems possible.

The problem of the nature of judgment or belief may be taken as an

example of a problem whose solution depends upon an adequate inventory

of logical forms. We have already seen how the supposed universality of

the subject-predicate form made it impossible to give a right analysis

of serial order, and therefore made space and time unintelligible. But

in this case it was only necessary to admit relations of two terms. The

case of judgment demands the admission of more complicated forms. If all

65
judgments were true, we might suppose that a judgment consisted in

apprehension of a fact, and that the apprehension was a relation of a

mind to the fact. From poverty in the logical inventory, this view has

often been held. But it leads to absolutely insoluble difficulties in

the case of error. Suppose I believe that Charles I. died in his bed.

There is no objective fact "Charles I.'s death in his bed" to which I

can have a relation of apprehension. Charles I. and death and his bed

are objective, but they are not, except in my thought, put together as

my false belief supposes. It is therefore necessary, in analysing a

belief, to look for some other logical form than a two-term relation.

Failure to realise this necessity has, in my opinion, vitiated almost

everything that has hitherto been written on the theory of knowledge,

making the problem of error insoluble and the difference between belief

and perception inexplicable.

Modern logic, as I hope is now evident, has the effect of enlarging our

abstract imagination, and providing an infinite number of possible

hypotheses to be applied in the analysis of any complex fact. In this

respect it is the exact opposite of the logic practised by the classical

tradition. In that logic, hypotheses which seem primâ facie possible

are professedly proved impossible, and it is decreed in advance that

reality must have a certain special character. In modern logic, on the

contrary, while the primâ facie hypotheses as a rule remain

admissible, others, which only logic would have suggested, are added to

our stock, and are very often found to be indispensable if a right

analysis of the facts is to be obtained. The old logic put thought in

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fetters, while the new logic gives it wings. It has, in my opinion,

introduced the same kind of advance into philosophy as Galileo

introduced into physics, making it possible at last to see what kinds of

problems may be capable of solution, and what kinds must be abandoned as

beyond human powers. And where a solution appears possible, the new

logic provides a method which enables us to obtain results that do not

merely embody personal idiosyncrasies, but must command the assent of

all who are competent to form an opinion.

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LECTURE III

ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD

Philosophy may be approached by many roads, but one of the oldest and

most travelled is the road which leads through doubt as to the reality

of the world of sense. In Indian mysticism, in Greek and modern monistic

philosophy from Parmenides onward, in Berkeley, in modern physics, we

find sensible appearance criticised and condemned for a bewildering

variety of motives. The mystic condemns it on the ground of immediate

knowledge of a more real and significant world behind the veil;

Parmenides and Plato condemn it because its continual flux is thought

inconsistent with the unchanging nature of the abstract entities

revealed by logical analysis; Berkeley brings several weapons, but his

chief is the subjectivity of sense-data, their dependence upon the

organisation and point of view of the spectator; while modern physics,

on the basis of sensible evidence itself, maintains a mad dance of

electrons which has, superficially at least, very little resemblance to

the immediate objects of sight or touch.

Every one of these lines of attack raises vital and interesting

problems.

The mystic, so long as he merely reports a positive revelation, cannot

be refuted; but when he denies reality to objects of sense, he may be

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questioned as to what he means by "reality," and may be asked how their

unreality follows from the supposed reality of his super-sensible world.

In answering these questions, he is led to a logic which merges into

that of Parmenides and Plato and the idealist tradition.

The logic of the idealist tradition has gradually grown very complex and

very abstruse, as may be seen from the Bradleian sample considered in

our first lecture. If we attempted to deal fully with this logic, we

should not have time to reach any other aspect of our subject; we will

therefore, while acknowledging that it deserves a long discussion, pass

by its central doctrines with only such occasional criticism as may

serve to exemplify other topics, and concentrate our attention on such

matters as its objections to the continuity of motion and the infinity

of space and time--objections which have been fully answered by modern

mathematicians in a manner constituting an abiding triumph for the

method of logical analysis in philosophy. These objections and the

modern answers to them will occupy our fifth, sixth, and seventh

lectures.

Berkeley's attack, as reinforced by the physiology of the sense-organs

and nerves and brain, is very powerful. I think it must be admitted as

probable that the immediate objects of sense depend for their existence

upon physiological conditions in ourselves, and that, for example, the

coloured surfaces which we see cease to exist when we shut our eyes. But

it would be a mistake to infer that they are dependent upon mind, not

real while we see them, or not the sole basis for our knowledge of the

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external world. This line of argument will be developed in the present

lecture.

The discrepancy between the world of physics and the world of sense,

which we shall consider in our fourth lecture, will be found to be more

apparent than real, and it will be shown that whatever there is reason

to believe in physics can probably be interpreted in terms of sense.

The instrument of discovery throughout is modern logic, a very different

science from the logic of the text-books and also from the logic of

idealism. Our second lecture has given a short account of modern logic

and of its points of divergence from the various traditional kinds of

logic.

In our last lecture, after a discussion of causality and free will, we

shall try to reach a general account of the logical-analytic method of

scientific philosophy, and a tentative estimate of the hopes of

philosophical progress which it allows us to entertain.

In this lecture, I wish to apply the logical-analytic method to one of

the oldest problems of philosophy, namely, the problem of our knowledge

of the external world. What I have to say on this problem does not

amount to an answer of a definite and dogmatic kind; it amounts only to

an analysis and statement of the questions involved, with an indication

of the directions in which evidence may be sought. But although not yet

a definite solution, what can be said at present seems to me to throw a

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completely new light on the problem, and to be indispensable, not only

in seeking the answer, but also in the preliminary question as to what

parts of our problem may possibly have an ascertainable answer.

In every philosophical problem, our investigation starts from what may

be called "data," by which I mean matters of common knowledge, vague,

complex, inexact, as common knowledge always is, but yet somehow

commanding our assent as on the whole and in some interpretation pretty

certainly true. In the case of our present problem, the common knowledge

involved is of various kinds. There is first our acquaintance with

particular objects of daily life--furniture, houses, towns, other

people, and so on. Then there is the extension of such particular

knowledge to particular things outside our personal experience, through

history and geography, newspapers, etc. And lastly, there is the

systematisation of all this knowledge of particulars by means of

physical science, which derives immense persuasive force from its

astonishing power of foretelling the future. We are quite willing to

admit that there may be errors of detail in this knowledge, but we

believe them to be discoverable and corrigible by the methods which have

given rise to our beliefs, and we do not, as practical men, entertain

for a moment the hypothesis that the whole edifice may be built on

insecure foundations. In the main, therefore, and without absolute

dogmatism as to this or that special portion, we may accept this mass of

common knowledge as affording data for our philosophical analysis.

It may be said--and this is an objection which must be met at the

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outset--that it is the duty of the philosopher to call in question the

admittedly fallible beliefs of daily life, and to replace them by

something more solid and irrefragable. In a sense this is true, and in a

sense it is effected in the course of analysis. But in another sense,

and a very important one, it is quite impossible. While admitting that

doubt is possible with regard to all our common knowledge, we must

nevertheless accept that knowledge in the main if philosophy is to be

possible at all. There is not any superfine brand of knowledge,

obtainable by the philosopher, which can give us a standpoint from which

to criticise the whole of the knowledge of daily life. The most that can

be done is to examine and purify our common knowledge by an internal

scrutiny, assuming the canons by which it has been obtained, and

applying them with more care and with more precision. Philosophy cannot

boast of having achieved such a degree of certainty that it can have

authority to condemn the facts of experience and the laws of science.

The philosophic scrutiny, therefore, though sceptical in regard to every

detail, is not sceptical as regards the whole. That is to say, its

criticism of details will only be based upon their relation to other

details, not upon some external criterion which can be applied to all

the details equally. The reason for this abstention from a universal

criticism is not any dogmatic confidence, but its exact opposite; it is

not that common knowledge must be true, but that we possess no

radically different kind of knowledge derived from some other source.

Universal scepticism, though logically irrefutable, is practically

barren; it can only, therefore, give a certain flavour of hesitancy to

our beliefs, and cannot be used to substitute other beliefs for them.

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Although data can only be criticised by other data, not by an outside

standard, yet we may distinguish different grades of certainty in the

different kinds of common knowledge which we enumerated just now. What

does not go beyond our own personal sensible acquaintance must be for us

the most certain: the "evidence of the senses" is proverbially the least

open to question. What depends on testimony, like the facts of history

and geography which are learnt from books, has varying degrees of

certainty according to the nature and extent of the testimony. Doubts as

to the existence of Napoleon can only be maintained for a joke, whereas

the historicity of Agamemnon is a legitimate subject of debate. In

science, again, we find all grades of certainty short of the highest.

The law of gravitation, at least as an approximate truth, has acquired

by this time the same kind of certainty as the existence of Napoleon,

whereas the latest speculations concerning the constitution of matter

would be universally acknowledged to have as yet only a rather slight

probability in their favour. These varying degrees of certainty

attaching to different data may be regarded as themselves forming part

of our data; they, along with the other data, lie within the vague,

complex, inexact body of knowledge which it is the business of the

philosopher to analyse.

The first thing that appears when we begin to analyse our common

knowledge is that some of it is derivative, while some is primitive;

that is to say, there is some that we only believe because of something

else from which it has been inferred in some sense, though not

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necessarily in a strict logical sense, while other parts are believed on

their own account, without the support of any outside evidence. It is

obvious that the senses give knowledge of the latter kind: the immediate

facts perceived by sight or touch or hearing do not need to be proved by

argument, but are completely self-evident. Psychologists, however, have

made us aware that what is actually given in sense is much less than

most people would naturally suppose, and that much of what at first

sight seems to be given is really inferred. This applies especially in

regard to our space-perceptions. For instance, we instinctively infer

the "real" size and shape of a visible object from its apparent size and

shape, according to its distance and our point of view. When we hear a

person speaking, our actual sensations usually miss a great deal of what

he says, and we supply its place by unconscious inference; in a foreign

language, where this process is more difficult, we find ourselves

apparently grown deaf, requiring, for example, to be much nearer the

stage at a theatre than would be necessary in our own country. Thus the

first step in the analysis of data, namely, the discovery of what is

really given in sense, is full of difficulty. We will, however, not

linger on this point; so long as its existence is realised, the exact

outcome does not make any very great difference in our main problem.

The next step in our analysis must be the consideration of how the

derivative parts of our common knowledge arise. Here we become involved

in a somewhat puzzling entanglement of logic and psychology.

Psychologically, a belief may be called derivative whenever it is caused

by one or more other beliefs, or by some fact of sense which is not

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simply what the belief asserts. Derivative beliefs in this sense

constantly arise without any process of logical inference, merely by

association of ideas or some equally extra-logical process. From the

expression of a man's face we judge as to what he is feeling: we say we

see that he is angry, when in fact we only see a frown. We do not

judge as to his state of mind by any logical process: the judgment grows

up, often without our being able to say what physical mark of emotion we

actually saw. In such a case, the knowledge is derivative

psychologically; but logically it is in a sense primitive, since it is

not the result of any logical deduction. There may or may not be a

possible deduction leading to the same result, but whether there is or

not, we certainly do not employ it. If we call a belief "logically

primitive" when it is not actually arrived at by a logical inference,

then innumerable beliefs are logically primitive which psychologically

are derivative. The separation of these two kinds of primitiveness is

vitally important to our present discussion.

When we reflect upon the beliefs which are logically but not

psychologically primitive, we find that, unless they can on reflection

be deduced by a logical process from beliefs which are also

psychologically primitive, our confidence in their truth tends to

diminish the more we think about them. We naturally believe, for

example, that tables and chairs, trees and mountains, are still there

when we turn our backs upon them. I do not wish for a moment to maintain

that this is certainly not the case, but I do maintain that the question

whether it is the case is not to be settled off-hand on any supposed

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ground of obviousness. The belief that they persist is, in all men

except a few philosophers, logically primitive, but it is not

psychologically primitive; psychologically, it arises only through our

having seen those tables and chairs, trees and mountains. As soon as the

question is seriously raised whether, because we have seen them, we have

a right to suppose that they are there still, we feel that some kind of

argument must be produced, and that if none is forthcoming, our belief

can be no more than a pious opinion. We do not feel this as regards the

immediate objects of sense: there they are, and as far as their

momentary existence is concerned, no further argument is required. There

is accordingly more need of justifying our psychologically derivative

beliefs than of justifying those that are primitive.

We are thus led to a somewhat vague distinction between what we may call

"hard" data and "soft" data. This distinction is a matter of degree, and

must not be pressed; but if not taken too seriously it may help to make

the situation clear. I mean by "hard" data those which resist the

solvent influence of critical reflection, and by "soft" data those

which, under the operation of this process, become to our minds more or

less doubtful. The hardest of hard data are of two sorts: the particular

facts of sense, and the general truths of logic. The more we reflect

upon these, the more we realise exactly what they are, and exactly what

a doubt concerning them really means, the more luminously certain do

they become. Verbal doubt concerning even these is possible, but

verbal doubt may occur when what is nominally being doubted is not

really in our thoughts, and only words are actually present to our

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minds. Real doubt, in these two cases, would, I think, be pathological.

At any rate, to me they seem quite certain, and I shall assume that you

agree with me in this. Without this assumption, we are in danger of

falling into that universal scepticism which, as we saw, is as barren as

it is irrefutable. If we are to continue philosophising, we must make

our bow to the sceptical hypothesis, and, while admitting the elegant

terseness of its philosophy, proceed to the consideration of other

hypotheses which, though perhaps not certain, have at least as good a

right to our respect as the hypothesis of the sceptic.

Applying our distinction of "hard" and "soft" data to psychologically

derivative but logically primitive beliefs, we shall find that most, if

not all, are to be classed as soft data. They may be found, on

reflection, to be capable of logical proof, and they then again become

believed, but no longer as data. As data, though entitled to a certain

limited respect, they cannot be placed on a level with the facts of

sense or the laws of logic. The kind of respect which they deserve seems

to me such as to warrant us in hoping, though not too confidently, that

the hard data may prove them to be at least probable. Also, if the hard

data are found to throw no light whatever upon their truth or falsehood,

we are justified, I think, in giving rather more weight to the

hypothesis of their truth than to the hypothesis of their falsehood. For

the present, however, let us confine ourselves to the hard data, with a

view to discovering what sort of world can be constructed by their means

alone.

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Our data now are primarily the facts of sense (i.e. of our own

sense-data) and the laws of logic. But even the severest scrutiny will

allow some additions to this slender stock. Some facts of

memory--especially of recent memory--seem to have the highest degree of

certainty. Some introspective facts are as certain as any facts of

sense. And facts of sense themselves must, for our present purposes, be

interpreted with a certain latitude. Spatial and temporal relations must

sometimes be included, for example in the case of a swift motion falling

wholly within the specious present. And some facts of comparison, such

as the likeness or unlikeness of two shades of colour, are certainly to

be included among hard data. Also we must remember that the distinction

of hard and soft data is psychological and subjective, so that, if there

are other minds than our own--which at our present stage must be held

doubtful--the catalogue of hard data may be different for them from what

it is for us.

Certain common beliefs are undoubtedly excluded from hard data. Such is

the belief which led us to introduce the distinction, namely, that

sensible objects in general persist when we are not perceiving them.

Such also is the belief in other people's minds: this belief is

obviously derivative from our perception of their bodies, and is felt to

demand logical justification as soon as we become aware of its

derivativeness. Belief in what is reported by the testimony of others,

including all that we learn from books, is of course involved in the

doubt as to whether other people have minds at all. Thus the world from

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which our reconstruction is to begin is very fragmentary. The best we

can say for it is that it is slightly more extensive than the world at

which Descartes arrived by a similar process, since that world contained

nothing except himself and his thoughts.

We are now in a position to understand and state the problem of our

knowledge of the external world, and to remove various misunderstandings

which have obscured the meaning of the problem. The problem really is:

Can the existence of anything other than our own hard data be inferred

from the existence of those data? But before considering this problem,

let us briefly consider what the problem is not.

When we speak of the "external" world in this discussion, we must not

mean "spatially external," unless "space" is interpreted in a peculiar

and recondite manner. The immediate objects of sight, the coloured

surfaces which make up the visible world, are spatially external in the

natural meaning of this phrase. We feel them to be "there" as opposed to

"here"; without making any assumption of an existence other than hard

data, we can more or less estimate the distance of a coloured surface.

It seems probable that distances, provided they are not too great, are

actually given more or less roughly in sight; but whether this is the

case or not, ordinary distances can certainly be estimated approximately

by means of the data of sense alone. The immediately given world is

spatial, and is further not wholly contained within our own bodies. Thus

our knowledge of what is external in this sense is not open to doubt.

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Another form in which the question is often put is: "Can we know of the

existence of any reality which is independent of ourselves?" This form

of the question suffers from the ambiguity of the two words

"independent" and "self." To take the Self first: the question as to

what is to be reckoned part of the Self and what is not, is a very

difficult one. Among many other things which we may mean by the Self,

two may be selected as specially important, namely, (1) the bare subject

which thinks and is aware of objects, (2) the whole assemblage of things

that would necessarily cease to exist if our lives came to an end. The

bare subject, if it exists at all, is an inference, and is not part of

the data; therefore this meaning of Self may be ignored in our present

inquiry. The second meaning is difficult to make precise, since we

hardly know what things depend upon our lives for their existence. And

in this form, the definition of Self introduces the word "depend," which

raises the same questions as are raised by the word "independent." Let

us therefore take up the word "independent," and return to the Self

later.

When we say that one thing is "independent" of another, we may mean

either that it is logically possible for the one to exist without the

other, or that there is no causal relation between the two such that the

one only occurs as the effect of the other. The only way, so far as I

know, in which one thing can be logically dependent upon another is

when the other is part of the one. The existence of a book, for

example, is logically dependent upon that of its pages: without the

pages there would be no book. Thus in this sense the question, "Can we

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know of the existence of any reality which is independent of ourselves?"

reduces to the question, "Can we know of the existence of any reality of

which our Self is not part?" In this form, the question brings us back

to the problem of defining the Self; but I think, however the Self may

be defined, even when it is taken as the bare subject, it cannot be

supposed to be part of the immediate object of sense; thus in this form

of the question we must admit that we can know of the existence of

realities independent of ourselves.

The question of causal dependence is much more difficult. To know that

one kind of thing is causally independent of another, we must know that

it actually occurs without the other. Now it is fairly obvious that,

whatever legitimate meaning we give to the Self, our thoughts and

feelings are causally dependent upon ourselves, i.e. do not occur when

there is no Self for them to belong to. But in the case of objects of

sense this is not obvious; indeed, as we saw, the common-sense view is

that such objects persist in the absence of any percipient. If this is

the case, then they are causally independent of ourselves; if not, not.

Thus in this form the question reduces to the question whether we can

know that objects of sense, or any other objects not our own thoughts

and feelings, exist at times when we are not perceiving them. This form,

in which the difficult word "independent" no longer occurs, is the form

in which we stated the problem a minute ago.

Our question in the above form raises two distinct problems, which it is

important to keep separate. First, can we know that objects of sense, or

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very similar objects, exist at times when we are not perceiving them?

Secondly, if this cannot be known, can we know that other objects,

inferable from objects of sense but not necessarily resembling them,

exist either when we are perceiving the objects of sense or at any other

time? This latter problem arises in philosophy as the problem of the

"thing in itself," and in science as the problem of matter as assumed in

physics. We will consider this latter problem first.

Owing to the fact that we feel passive in sensation, we naturally

suppose that our sensations have outside causes. Now it is necessary

here first of all to distinguish between (1) our sensation, which is a

mental event consisting in our being aware of a sensible object, and (2)

the sensible object of which we are aware in sensation. When I speak of

the sensible object, it must be understood that I do not mean such a

thing as a table, which is both visible and tangible, can be seen by

many people at once, and is more or less permanent. What I mean is just

that patch of colour which is momentarily seen when we look at the

table, or just that particular hardness which is felt when we press it,

or just that particular sound which is heard when we rap it. Each of

these I call a sensible object, and our awareness of it I call a

sensation. Now our sense of passivity, if it really afforded any

argument, would only tend to show that the sensation has an outside

cause; this cause we should naturally seek in the sensible object. Thus

there is no good reason, so far, for supposing that sensible objects

must have outside causes. But both the thing-in-itself of philosophy and

the matter of physics present themselves as outside causes of the

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sensible object as much as of the sensation. What are the grounds for

this common opinion?

In each case, I think, the opinion has resulted from the combination of

a belief that something which can persist independently of our

consciousness makes itself known in sensation, with the fact that our

sensations often change in ways which seem to depend upon us rather than

upon anything which would be supposed to persist independently of us. At

first, we believe unreflectingly that everything is as it seems to be,

and that, if we shut our eyes, the objects we had been seeing remain as

they were though we no longer see them. But there are arguments against

this view, which have generally been thought conclusive. It is

extraordinarily difficult to see just what the arguments prove; but if

we are to make any progress with the problem of the external world, we

must try to make up our minds as to these arguments.

A table viewed from one place presents a different appearance from that

which it presents from another place. This is the language of common

sense, but this language already assumes that there is a real table of

which we see the appearances. Let us try to state what is known in terms

of sensible objects alone, without any element of hypothesis. We find

that as we walk round the table, we perceive a series of gradually

changing visible objects. But in speaking of "walking round the table,"

we have still retained the hypothesis that there is a single table

connected with all the appearances. What we ought to say is that, while

we have those muscular and other sensations which make us say we are

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walking, our visual sensations change in a continuous way, so that, for

example, a striking patch of colour is not suddenly replaced by

something wholly different, but is replaced by an insensible gradation

of slightly different colours with slightly different shapes. This is

what we really know by experience, when we have freed our minds from the

assumption of permanent "things" with changing appearances. What is

really known is a correlation of muscular and other bodily sensations

with changes in visual sensations.

But walking round the table is not the only way of altering its

appearance. We can shut one eye, or put on blue spectacles, or look

through a microscope. All these operations, in various ways, alter the

visual appearance which we call that of the table. More distant objects

will also alter their appearance if (as we say) the state of the

atmosphere changes--if there is fog or rain or sunshine. Physiological

changes also alter the appearances of things. If we assume the world of

common sense, all these changes, including those attributed to

physiological causes, are changes in the intervening medium. It is not

quite so easy as in the former case to reduce this set of facts to a

form in which nothing is assumed beyond sensible objects. Anything

intervening between ourselves and what we see must be invisible: our

view in every direction is bounded by the nearest visible object. It

might be objected that a dirty pane of glass, for example, is visible

although we can see things through it. But in this case we really see a

spotted patchwork: the dirtier specks in the glass are visible, while

the cleaner parts are invisible and allow us to see what is beyond. Thus

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the discovery that the intervening medium affects the appearances of

things cannot be made by means of the sense of sight alone.

Let us take the case of the blue spectacles, which is the simplest, but

may serve as a type for the others. The frame of the spectacles is of

course visible, but the blue glass, if it is clean, is not visible. The

blueness, which we say is in the glass, appears as being in the objects

seen through the glass. The glass itself is known by means of the sense

of touch. In order to know that it is between us and the objects seen

through it, we must know how to correlate the space of touch with the

space of sight. This correlation itself, when stated in terms of the

data of sense alone, is by no means a simple matter. But it presents no

difficulties of principle, and may therefore be supposed accomplished.

When it has been accomplished, it becomes possible to attach a meaning

to the statement that the blue glass, which we can touch, is between us

and the object seen, as we say, "through" it.

But we have still not reduced our statement completely to what is

actually given in sense. We have fallen into the assumption that the

object of which we are conscious when we touch the blue spectacles still

exists after we have ceased to touch them. So long as we are touching

them, nothing except our finger can be seen through the part touched,

which is the only part where we immediately know that there is

something. If we are to account for the blue appearance of objects other

than the spectacles, when seen through them, it might seem as if we must

assume that the spectacles still exist when we are not touching them;

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and if this assumption really is necessary, our main problem is

answered: we have means of knowing of the present existence of objects

not given in sense, though of the same kind as objects formerly given in

sense.

It may be questioned, however, whether this assumption is actually

unavoidable, though it is unquestionably the most natural one to make.

We may say that the object of which we become aware when we touch the

spectacles continues to have effects afterwards, though perhaps it no

longer exists. In this view, the supposed continued existence of

sensible objects after they have ceased to be sensible will be a

fallacious inference from the fact that they still have effects. It is

often supposed that nothing which has ceased to exist can continue to

have effects, but this is a mere prejudice, due to a wrong conception of

causality. We cannot, therefore, dismiss our present hypothesis on the

ground of a priori impossibility, but must examine further whether it

can really account for the facts.

It may be said that our hypothesis is useless in the case when the blue

glass is never touched at all. How, in that case, are we to account for

the blue appearance of objects? And more generally, what are we to make

of the hypothetical sensations of touch which we associate with

untouched visible objects, which we know would be verified if we chose,

though in fact we do not verify them? Must not these be attributed to

permanent possession, by the objects, of the properties which touch

would reveal?

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Let us consider the more general question first. Experience has taught

us that where we see certain kinds of coloured surfaces we can, by

touch, obtain certain expected sensations of hardness or softness,

tactile shape, and so on. This leads us to believe that what is seen is

usually tangible, and that it has, whether we touch it or not, the

hardness or softness which we should expect to feel if we touched it.

But the mere fact that we are able to infer what our tactile sensations

would be shows that it is not logically necessary to assume tactile

qualities before they are felt. All that is really known is that the

visual appearance in question, together with touch, will lead to certain

sensations, which can necessarily be determined in terms of the visual

appearance, since otherwise they could not be inferred from it.

We can now give a statement of the experienced facts concerning the blue

spectacles, which will supply an interpretation of common-sense beliefs

without assuming anything beyond the existence of sensible objects at

the times when they are sensible. By experience of the correlation of

touch and sight sensations, we become able to associate a certain place

in touch-space with a certain corresponding place in sight-space.

Sometimes, namely in the case of transparent things, we find that there

is a tangible object in a touch-place without there being any visible

object in the corresponding sight-place. But in such a case as that of

the blue spectacles, we find that whatever object is visible beyond the

empty sight-place in the same line of sight has a different colour from

what it has when there is no tangible object in the intervening

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touch-place; and as we move the tangible object in touch-space, the blue

patch moves in sight-space. If now we find a blue patch moving in this

way in sight-space, when we have no sensible experience of an

intervening tangible object, we nevertheless infer that, if we put our

hand at a certain place in touch-space, we should experience a certain

touch-sensation. If we are to avoid non-sensible objects, this must be

taken as the whole of our meaning when we say that the blue spectacles

are in a certain place, though we have not touched them, and have only

seen other things rendered blue by their interposition.

I think it may be laid down quite generally that, in so far as physics

or common sense is verifiable, it must be capable of interpretation in

terms of actual sense-data alone. The reason for this is simple.

Verification consists always in the occurrence of an expected

sense-datum. Astronomers tell us there will be an eclipse of the moon:

we look at the moon, and find the earth's shadow biting into it, that is

to say, we see an appearance quite different from that of the usual full

moon. Now if an expected sense-datum constitutes a verification, what

was asserted must have been about sense-data; or, at any rate, if part

of what was asserted was not about sense-data, then only the other part

has been verified. There is in fact a certain regularity or conformity

to law about the occurrence of sense-data, but the sense-data that occur

at one time are often causally connected with those that occur at quite

other times, and not, or at least not very closely, with those that

occur at neighbouring times. If I look at the moon and immediately

afterwards hear a train coming, there is no very close causal connection

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between my two sense-data; but if I look at the moon on two nights a

week apart, there is a very close causal connection between the two

sense-data. The simplest, or at least the easiest, statement of the

connection is obtained by imagining a "real" moon which goes on whether

I look at it or not, providing a series of possible sense-data of

which only those are actual which belong to moments when I choose to

look at the moon.

But the degree of verification obtainable in this way is very small. It

must be remembered that, at our present level of doubt, we are not at

liberty to accept testimony. When we hear certain noises, which are

those we should utter if we wished to express a certain thought, we

assume that that thought, or one very like it, has been in another mind,

and has given rise to the expression which we hear. If at the same time

we see a body resembling our own, moving its lips as we move ours when

we speak, we cannot resist the belief that it is alive, and that the

feelings inside it continue when we are not looking at it. When we see

our friend drop a weight upon his toe, and hear him say--what we should

say in similar circumstances, the phenomena can no doubt be explained

without assuming that he is anything but a series of shapes and noises

seen and heard by us, but practically no man is so infected with

philosophy as not to be quite certain that his friend has felt the same

kind of pain as he himself would feel. We will consider the legitimacy

of this belief presently; for the moment, I only wish to point out that

it needs the same kind of justification as our belief that the moon

exists when we do not see it, and that, without it, testimony heard or

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read is reduced to noises and shapes, and cannot be regarded as evidence

of the facts which it reports. The verification of physics which is

possible at our present level is, therefore, only that degree of

verification which is possible by one man's unaided observations, which

will not carry us very far towards the establishment of a whole science.

Before proceeding further, let us summarise the argument so far as it

has gone. The problem is: "Can the existence of anything other than our

own hard data be inferred from these data?" It is a mistake to state the

problem in the form: "Can we know of the existence of anything other

than ourselves and our states?" or: "Can we know of the existence of

anything independent of ourselves?" because of the extreme difficulty of

defining "self" and "independent" precisely. The felt passivity of

sensation is irrelevant, since, even if it proved anything, it could

only prove that sensations are caused by sensible objects. The natural

naïve belief is that things seen persist, when unseen, exactly or

approximately as they appeared when seen; but this belief tends to be

dispelled by the fact that what common sense regards as the appearance

of one object changes with what common sense regards as changes in the

point of view and in the intervening medium, including in the latter our

own sense-organs and nerves and brain. This fact, as just stated,

assumes, however, the common-sense world of stable objects which it

professes to call in question; hence, before we can discover its precise

bearing on our problem, we must find a way of stating it which does not

involve any of the assumptions which it is designed to render doubtful.

What we then find, as the bare outcome of experience, is that gradual

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changes in certain sense-data are correlated with gradual changes in

certain others, or (in the case of bodily motions) with the other

sense-data themselves.

The assumption that sensible objects persist after they have ceased to

be sensible--for example, that the hardness of a visible body, which has

been discovered by touch, continues when the body is no longer

touched--may be replaced by the statement that the effects of sensible

objects persist, i.e. that what happens now can only be accounted for,

in many cases, by taking account of what happened at an earlier time.

Everything that one man, by his own personal experience, can verify in

the account of the world given by common sense and physics, will be

explicable by some such means, since verification consists merely in the

occurrence of an expected sense-datum. But what depends upon testimony,

whether heard or read, cannot be explained in this way, since testimony

depends upon the existence of minds other than our own, and thus

requires a knowledge of something not given in sense. But before

examining the question of our knowledge of other minds, let us return to

the question of the thing-in-itself, namely, to the theory that what

exists at times when we are not perceiving a given sensible object is

something quite unlike that object, something which, together with us

and our sense-organs, causes our sensations, but is never itself given

in sensation.

The thing-in-itself, when we start from common-sense assumptions, is a

fairly natural outcome of the difficulties due to the changing

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appearances of what is supposed to be one object. It is supposed that

the table (for example) causes our sense-data of sight and touch, but

must, since these are altered by the point of view and the intervening

medium, be quite different from the sense-data to which it gives rise.

There is, in this theory, a tendency to a confusion from which it

derives some of its plausibility, namely, the confusion between a

sensation as a psychical occurrence and its object. A patch of colour,

even if it only exists when it is seen, is still something quite

different from the seeing of it: the seeing of it is mental, but the

patch of colour is not. This confusion, however, can be avoided without

our necessarily abandoning the theory we are examining. The objection to

it, I think, lies in its failure to realise the radical nature of the

reconstruction demanded by the difficulties to which it points. We

cannot speak legitimately of changes in the point of view and the

intervening medium until we have already constructed some world more

stable than that of momentary sensation. Our discussion of the blue

spectacles and the walk round the table has, I hope, made this clear.

But what remains far from clear is the nature of the reconstruction

required.

Although we cannot rest content with the above theory, in the terms in

which it is stated, we must nevertheless treat it with a certain

respect, for it is in outline the theory upon which physical science and

physiology are built, and it must, therefore, be susceptible of a true

interpretation. Let us see how this is to be done.

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The first thing to realise is that there are no such things as

"illusions of sense." Objects of sense, even when they occur in dreams,

are the most indubitably real objects known to us. What, then, makes us

call them unreal in dreams? Merely the unusual nature of their

connection with other objects of sense. I dream that I am in America,

but I wake up and find myself in England without those intervening days

on the Atlantic which, alas! are inseparably connected with a "real"

visit to America. Objects of sense are called "real" when they have the

kind of connection with other objects of sense which experience has led

us to regard as normal; when they fail in this, they are called

"illusions." But what is illusory is only the inferences to which they

give rise; in themselves, they are every bit as real as the objects of

waking life. And conversely, the sensible objects of waking life must

not be expected to have any more intrinsic reality than those of dreams.

Dreams and waking life, in our first efforts at construction, must be

treated with equal respect; it is only by some reality not merely

sensible that dreams can be condemned.

Accepting the indubitable momentary reality of objects of sense, the

next thing to notice is the confusion underlying objections derived from

their changeableness. As we walk round the table, its aspect changes;

but it is thought impossible to maintain either that the table changes,

or that its various aspects can all "really" exist in the same place. If

we press one eyeball, we shall see two tables; but it is thought

preposterous to maintain that there are "really" two tables. Such

arguments, however, seem to involve the assumption that there can be

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something more real than objects of sense. If we see two tables, then

there are two visual tables. It is perfectly true that, at the same

moment, we may discover by touch that there is only one tactile table.

This makes us declare the two visual tables an illusion, because usually

one visual object corresponds to one tactile object. But all that we are

warranted in saying is that, in this case, the manner of correlation of

touch and sight is unusual. Again, when the aspect of the table changes

as we walk round it, and we are told there cannot be so many different

aspects in the same place, the answer is simple: what does the critic of

the table mean by "the same place"? The use of such a phrase presupposes

that all our difficulties have been solved; as yet, we have no right to

speak of a "place" except with reference to one given set of momentary

sense-data. When all are changed by a bodily movement, no place remains

the same as it was. Thus the difficulty, if it exists, has at least not

been rightly stated.

We will now make a new start, adopting a different method. Instead of

inquiring what is the minimum of assumption by which we can explain the

world of sense, we will, in order to have a model hypothesis as a help

for the imagination, construct one possible (not necessary) explanation

of the facts. It may perhaps then be possible to pare away what is

superfluous in our hypothesis, leaving a residue which may be regarded

as the abstract answer to our problem.

Let us imagine that each mind looks out upon the world, as in Leibniz's

monadology, from a point of view peculiar to itself; and for the sake of

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simplicity let us confine ourselves to the sense of sight, ignoring

minds which are devoid of this sense. Each mind sees at each moment an

immensely complex three-dimensional world; but there is absolutely

nothing which is seen by two minds simultaneously. When we say that two

people see the same thing, we always find that, owing to difference of

point of view, there are differences, however slight, between their

immediate sensible objects. (I am here assuming the validity of

testimony, but as we are only constructing a possible theory, that is

a legitimate assumption.) The three-dimensional world seen by one mind

therefore contains no place in common with that seen by another, for

places can only be constituted by the things in or around them. Hence we

may suppose, in spite of the differences between the different worlds,

that each exists entire exactly as it is perceived, and might be exactly

as it is even if it were not perceived. We may further suppose that

there are an infinite number of such worlds which are in fact

unperceived. If two men are sitting in a room, two somewhat similar

worlds are perceived by them; if a third man enters and sits between

them, a third world, intermediate between the two previous worlds,

begins to be perceived. It is true that we cannot reasonably suppose

just this world to have existed before, because it is conditioned by the

sense-organs, nerves, and brain of the newly arrived man; but we can

reasonably suppose that some aspect of the universe existed from that

point of view, though no one was perceiving it. The system consisting of

all views of the universe perceived and unperceived, I shall call the

system of "perspectives"; I shall confine the expression "private

worlds" to such views of the universe as are actually perceived. Thus a

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"private world" is a perceived "perspective"; but there may be any

number of unperceived perspectives.

Two men are sometimes found to perceive very similar perspectives, so

similar that they can use the same words to describe them. They say they

see the same table, because the differences between the two tables they

see are slight and not practically important. Thus it is possible,

sometimes, to establish a correlation by similarity between a great many

of the things of one perspective, and a great many of the things of

another. In case the similarity is very great, we say the points of view

of the two perspectives are near together in space; but this space in

which they are near together is totally different from the spaces inside

the two perspectives. It is a relation between the perspectives, and is

not in either of them; no one can perceive it, and if it is to be known

it can be only by inference. Between two perceived perspectives which

are similar, we can imagine a whole series of other perspectives, some

at least unperceived, and such that between any two, however similar,

there are others still more similar. In this way the space which

consists of relations between perspectives can be rendered continuous,

and (if we choose) three-dimensional.

We can now define the momentary common-sense "thing," as opposed to its

momentary appearances. By the similarity of neighbouring perspectives,

many objects in the one can be correlated with objects in the other,

namely, with the similar objects. Given an object in one perspective,

form the system of all the objects correlated with it in all the

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perspectives; that system may be identified with the momentary

common-sense "thing." Thus an aspect of a "thing" is a member of the

system of aspects which is the "thing" at that moment. (The

correlation of the times of different perspectives raises certain

complications, of the kind considered in the theory of relativity; but

we may ignore these at present.) All the aspects of a thing are real,

whereas the thing is a mere logical construction. It has, however, the

merit of being neutral as between different points of view, and of being

visible to more than one person, in the only sense in which it can ever

be visible, namely, in the sense that each sees one of its aspects.

It will be observed that, while each perspective contains its own space,

there is only one space in which the perspectives themselves are the

elements. There are as many private spaces as there are perspectives;

there are therefore at least as many as there are percipients, and there

may be any number of others which have a merely material existence and

are not seen by anyone. But there is only one perspective-space, whose

elements are single perspectives, each with its own private space. We

have now to explain how the private space of a single perspective is

correlated with part of the one all-embracing perspective space.

Perspective space is the system of "points of view" of private spaces

(perspectives), or, since "points of view" have not been defined, we may

say it is the system of the private spaces themselves. These private

spaces will each count as one point, or at any rate as one element, in

perspective space. They are ordered by means of their similarities.

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Suppose, for example, that we start from one which contains the

appearance of a circular disc, such as would be called a penny, and

suppose this appearance, in the perspective in question, is circular,

not elliptic. We can then form a whole series of perspectives containing

a graduated series of circular aspects of varying sizes: for this

purpose we only have to move (as we say) towards the penny or away from

it. The perspectives in which the penny looks circular will be said to

lie on a straight line in perspective space, and their order on this

line will be that of the sizes of the circular aspects. Moreover--though

this statement must be noticed and subsequently examined--the

perspectives in which the penny looks big will be said to be nearer to

the penny than those in which it looks small. It is to be remarked also

that any other "thing" than our penny might have been chosen to define

the relations of our perspectives in perspective space, and that

experience shows that the same spatial order of perspectives would have

resulted.

In order to explain the correlation of private spaces with perspective

space, we have first to explain what is meant by "the place (in

perspective space) where a thing is." For this purpose, let us again

consider the penny which appears in many perspectives. We formed a

straight line of perspectives in which the penny looked circular, and we

agreed that those in which it looked larger were to be considered as

nearer to the penny. We can form another straight line of perspectives

in which the penny is seen end-on and looks like a straight line of a

certain thickness. These two lines will meet in a certain place in

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perspective space, i.e. in a certain perspective, which may be defined

as "the place (in perspective space) where the penny is." It is true

that, in order to prolong our lines until they reach this place, we

shall have to make use of other things besides the penny, because, so

far as experience goes, the penny ceases to present any appearance after

we have come so near to it that it touches the eye. But this raises no

real difficulty, because the spatial order of perspectives is found

empirically to be independent of the particular "things" chosen for

defining the order. We can, for example, remove our penny and prolong

each of our two straight lines up to their intersection by placing other

pennies further off in such a way that the aspects of the one are

circular where those of our original penny were circular, and the

aspects of the other are straight where those of our original penny were

straight. There will then be just one perspective in which one of the

new pennies looks circular and the other straight. This will be, by

definition, the place where the original penny was in perspective space.

The above is, of course, only a first rough sketch of the way in which

our definition is to be reached. It neglects the size of the penny, and

it assumes that we can remove the penny without being disturbed by any

simultaneous changes in the positions of other things. But it is plain

that such niceties cannot affect the principle, and can only introduce

complications in its application.

Having now defined the perspective which is the place where a given

thing is, we can understand what is meant by saying that the

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perspectives in which a thing looks large are nearer to the thing than

those in which it looks small: they are, in fact, nearer to the

perspective which is the place where the thing is.

We can now also explain the correlation between a private space and

parts of perspective space. If there is an aspect of a given thing in a

certain private space, then we correlate the place where this aspect is

in the private space with the place where the thing is in perspective

space.

We may define "here" as the place, in perspective space, which is

occupied by our private world. Thus we can now understand what is meant

by speaking of a thing as near to or far from "here." A thing is near to

"here" if the place where it is is near to my private world. We can also

understand what is meant by saying that our private world is inside our

head; for our private world is a place in perspective space, and may be

part of the place where our head is.

It will be observed that two places in perspective space are

associated with every aspect of a thing: namely, the place where the

thing is, and the place which is the perspective of which the aspect in

question forms part. Every aspect of a thing is a member of two

different classes of aspects, namely: (1) the various aspects of the

thing, of which at most one appears in any given perspective; (2) the

perspective of which the given aspect is a member, i.e. that in which

the thing has the given aspect. The physicist naturally classifies

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aspects in the first way, the psychologist in the second. The two places

associated with a single aspect correspond to the two ways of

classifying it. We may distinguish the two places as that at which,

and that from which, the aspect appears. The "place at which" is the

place of the thing to which the aspect belongs; the "place from which"

is the place of the perspective to which the aspect belongs.

Let us now endeavour to state the fact that the aspect which a thing

presents at a given place is affected by the intervening medium. The

aspects of a thing in different perspectives are to be conceived as

spreading outwards from the place where the thing is, and undergoing

various changes as they get further away from this place. The laws

according to which they change cannot be stated if we only take account

of the aspects that are near the thing, but require that we should also

take account of the things that are at the places from which these

aspects appear. This empirical fact can, therefore, be interpreted in

terms of our construction.

We have now constructed a largely hypothetical picture of the world,

which contains and places the experienced facts, including those derived

from testimony. The world we have constructed can, with a certain amount

of trouble, be used to interpret the crude facts of sense, the facts of

physics, and the facts of physiology. It is therefore a world which

may be actual. It fits the facts, and there is no empirical evidence

against it; it also is free from logical impossibilities. But have we

any good reason to suppose that it is real? This brings us back to our

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original problem, as to the grounds for believing in the existence of

anything outside my private world. What we have derived from our

hypothetical construction is that there are no grounds against the

truth of this belief, but we have not derived any positive grounds in

its favour. We will resume this inquiry by taking up again the question

of testimony and the evidence for the existence of other minds.

It must be conceded to begin with that the argument in favour of the

existence of other people's minds cannot be conclusive. A phantasm of

our dreams will appear to have a mind--a mind to be annoying, as a rule.

It will give unexpected answers, refuse to conform to our desires, and

show all those other signs of intelligence to which we are accustomed in

the acquaintances of our waking hours. And yet, when we are awake, we do

not believe that the phantasm was, like the appearances of people in

waking life, representative of a private world to which we have no

direct access. If we are to believe this of the people we meet when we

are awake, it must be on some ground short of demonstration, since it is

obviously possible that what we call waking life may be only an

unusually persistent and recurrent nightmare. It may be that our

imagination brings forth all that other people seem to say to us, all

that we read in books, all the daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly

journals that distract our thoughts, all the advertisements of soap and

all the speeches of politicians. This may be true, since it cannot be

shown to be false, yet no one can really believe it. Is there any

logical ground for regarding this possibility as improbable? Or is

there nothing beyond habit and prejudice?

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The minds of other people are among our data, in the very wide sense in

which we used the word at first. That is to say, when we first begin to

reflect, we find ourselves already believing in them, not because of any

argument, but because the belief is natural to us. It is, however, a

psychologically derivative belief, since it results from observation of

people's bodies; and along with other such beliefs, it does not belong

to the hardest of hard data, but becomes, under the influence of

philosophic reflection, just sufficiently questionable to make us desire

some argument connecting it with the facts of sense.

The obvious argument is, of course, derived from analogy. Other people's

bodies behave as ours do when we have certain thoughts and feelings;

hence, by analogy, it is natural to suppose that such behaviour is

connected with thoughts and feelings like our own. Someone says, "Look

out!" and we find we are on the point of being killed by a motor-car; we

therefore attribute the words we heard to the person in question having

seen the motor-car first, in which case there are existing things of

which we are not directly conscious. But this whole scene, with our

inference, may occur in a dream, in which case the inference is

generally considered to be mistaken. Is there anything to make the

argument from analogy more cogent when we are (as we think) awake?

The analogy in waking life is only to be preferred to that in dreams on

the ground of its greater extent and consistency. If a man were to dream

every night about a set of people whom he never met by day, who had

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consistent characters and grew older with the lapse of years, he might,

like the man in Calderon's play, find it difficult to decide which was

the dream-world and which was the so-called "real" world. It is only the

failure of our dreams to form a consistent whole either with each other

or with waking life that makes us condemn them. Certain uniformities are

observed in waking life, while dreams seem quite erratic. The natural

hypothesis would be that demons and the spirits of the dead visit us

while we sleep; but the modern mind, as a rule, refuses to entertain

this view, though it is hard to see what could be said against it. On

the other hand, the mystic, in moments of illumination, seems to awaken

from a sleep which has filled all his mundane life: the whole world of

sense becomes phantasmal, and he sees, with the clarity and

convincingness that belongs to our morning realisation after dreams, a

world utterly different from that of our daily cares and troubles. Who

shall condemn him? Who shall justify him? Or who shall justify the

seeming solidity of the common objects among which we suppose ourselves

to live?

The hypothesis that other people have minds must, I think, be allowed to

be not susceptible of any very strong support from the analogical

argument. At the same time, it is a hypothesis which systematises a vast

body of facts and never leads to any consequences which there is reason

to think false. There is therefore nothing to be said against its truth,

and good reason to use it as a working hypothesis. When once it is

admitted, it enables us to extend our knowledge of the sensible world by

testimony, and thus leads to the system of private worlds which we

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assumed in our hypothetical construction. In actual fact, whatever we

may try to think as philosophers, we cannot help believing in the minds

of other people, so that the question whether our belief is justified

has a merely speculative interest. And if it is justified, then there is

no further difficulty of principle in that vast extension of our

knowledge, beyond our own private data, which we find in science and

common sense.

This somewhat meagre conclusion must not be regarded as the whole

outcome of our long discussion. The problem of the connection of sense

with objective reality has commonly been dealt with from a standpoint

which did not carry initial doubt so far as we have carried it; most

writers, consciously or unconsciously, have assumed that the testimony

of others is to be admitted, and therefore (at least by implication)

that others have minds. Their difficulties have arisen after this

admission, from the differences in the appearance which one physical

object presents to two people at the same time, or to one person at two

times between which it cannot be supposed to have changed. Such

difficulties have made people doubtful how far objective reality could

be known by sense at all, and have made them suppose that there were

positive arguments against the view that it can be so known. Our

hypothetical construction meets these arguments, and shows that the

account of the world given by common sense and physical science can be

interpreted in a way which is logically unobjectionable, and finds a

place for all the data, both hard and soft. It is this hypothetical

construction, with its reconciliation of psychology and physics, which

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is the chief outcome of our discussion. Probably the construction is

only in part necessary as an initial assumption, and can be obtained

from more slender materials by the logical methods of which we shall

have an example in the definitions of points, instants, and particles;

but I do not yet know to what lengths this diminution in our initial

assumptions can be carried.

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LECTURE IV

THE WORLD OF PHYSICS AND THE WORLD OF SENSE

Among the objections to the reality of objects of sense, there is one

which is derived from the apparent difference between matter as it

appears in physics and things as they appear in sensation. Men of

science, for the most part, are willing to condemn immediate data as

"merely subjective," while yet maintaining the truth of the physics

inferred from those data. But such an attitude, though it may be

capable of justification, obviously stands in need of it; and the only

justification possible must be one which exhibits matter as a logical

construction from sense-data--unless, indeed, there were some wholly a

priori principle by which unknown entities could be inferred from such

as are known. It is therefore necessary to find some way of bridging the

gulf between the world of physics and the world of sense, and it is this

problem which will occupy us in the present lecture. Physicists appear

to be unconscious of the gulf, while psychologists, who are conscious of

it, have not the mathematical knowledge required for spanning it. The

problem is difficult, and I do not know its solution in detail. All that

I can hope to do is to make the problem felt, and to indicate the kind

of methods by which a solution is to be sought.

Let us begin by a brief description of the two contrasted worlds. We

will take first the world of physics, for, though the other world is

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given while the physical world is inferred, to us now the world of

physics is the more familiar, the world of pure sense having become

strange and difficult to rediscover. Physics started from the

common-sense belief in fairly permanent and fairly rigid bodies--tables

and chairs, stones, mountains, the earth and moon and sun. This

common-sense belief, it should be noticed, is a piece of audacious

metaphysical theorising; objects are not continually present to

sensation, and it may be doubted whether they are there when they are

not seen or felt. This problem, which has been acute since the time of

Berkeley, is ignored by common sense, and has therefore hitherto been

ignored by physicists. We have thus here a first departure from the

immediate data of sensation, though it is a departure merely by way of

extension, and was probably made by our savage ancestors in some very

remote prehistoric epoch.

But tables and chairs, stones and mountains, are not quite permanent

or quite rigid. Tables and chairs lose their legs, stones are split by

frost, and mountains are cleft by earthquakes and eruptions. Then there

are other things, which seem material, and yet present almost no

permanence or rigidity. Breath, smoke, clouds, are examples of such

things--so, in a lesser degree, are ice and snow; and rivers and seas,

though fairly permanent, are not in any degree rigid. Breath, smoke,

clouds, and generally things that can be seen but not touched, were

thought to be hardly real; to this day the usual mark of a ghost is that

it can be seen but not touched. Such objects were peculiar in the fact

that they seemed to disappear completely, not merely to be transformed

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into something else. Ice and snow, when they disappear, are replaced by

water; and it required no great theoretical effort to invent the

hypothesis that the water was the same thing as the ice and snow, but in

a new form. Solid bodies, when they break, break into parts which are

practically the same in shape and size as they were before. A stone can

be hammered into a powder, but the powder consists of grains which

retain the character they had before the pounding. Thus the ideal of

absolutely rigid and absolutely permanent bodies, which early physicists

pursued throughout the changing appearances, seemed attainable by

supposing ordinary bodies to be composed of a vast number of tiny atoms.

This billiard-ball view of matter dominated the imagination of

physicists until quite modern times, until, in fact, it was replaced by

the electromagnetic theory, which in its turn is developing into a new

atomism. Apart from the special form of the atomic theory which was

invented for the needs of chemistry, some kind of atomism dominated the

whole of traditional dynamics, and was implied in every statement of its

laws and axioms.

The pictorial accounts which physicists give of the material world as

they conceive it undergo violent changes under the influence of

modifications in theory which are much slighter than the layman might

suppose from the alterations of the description. Certain features,

however, have remained fairly stable. It is always assumed that there is

something indestructible which is capable of motion in space; what is

indestructible is always very small, but does not always occupy a mere

point in space. There is supposed to be one all-embracing space in which

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the motion takes place, and until lately we might have assumed one

all-embracing time also. But the principle of relativity has given

prominence to the conception of "local time," and has somewhat

diminished men's confidence in the one even-flowing stream of time.

Without dogmatising as to the ultimate outcome of the principle of

relativity, however, we may safely say, I think, that it does not

destroy the possibility of correlating different local times, and does

not therefore have such far-reaching philosophical consequences as is

sometimes supposed. In fact, in spite of difficulties as to measurement,

the one all-embracing time still, I think, underlies all that physics

has to say about motion. We thus have still in physics, as we had in

Newton's time, a set of indestructible entities which may be called

particles, moving relatively to each other in a single space and a

single time.

The world of immediate data is quite different from this. Nothing is

permanent; even the things that we think are fairly permanent, such as

mountains, only become data when we see them, and are not immediately

given as existing at other moments. So far from one all-embracing space

being given, there are several spaces for each person, according to the

different senses which give relations that may be called spatial.

Experience teaches us to obtain one space from these by correlation, and

experience, together with instinctive theorising, teaches us to

correlate our spaces with those which we believe to exist in the

sensible worlds of other people. The construction of a single time

offers less difficulty so long as we confine ourselves to one person's

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private world, but the correlation of one private time with another is a

matter of great difficulty. Thus, apart from any of the fluctuating

hypotheses of physics, three main problems arise in connecting the world

of physics with the world of sense, namely (1) the construction of

permanent "things," (2) the construction of a single space, and (3) the

construction of a single time. We will consider these three problems in

succession.

(1) The belief in indestructible "things" very early took the form of

atomism. The underlying motive in atomism was not, I think, any

empirical success in interpreting phenomena, but rather an instinctive

belief that beneath all the changes of the sensible world there must be

something permanent and unchanging. This belief was, no doubt, fostered

and nourished by its practical successes, culminating in the

conservation of mass; but it was not produced by these successes. On the

contrary, they were produced by it. Philosophical writers on physics

sometimes speak as though the conservation of something or other were

essential to the possibility of science, but this, I believe, is an

entirely erroneous opinion. If the a priori belief in permanence had

not existed, the same laws which are now formulated in terms of this

belief might just as well have been formulated without it. Why should we

suppose that, when ice melts, the water which replaces it is the same

thing in a new form? Merely because this supposition enables us to state

the phenomena in a way which is consonant with our prejudices. What we

really know is that, under certain conditions of temperature, the

appearance we call ice is replaced by the appearance we call water. We

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can give laws according to which the one appearance will be succeeded by

the other, but there is no reason except prejudice for regarding both as

appearances of the same substance.

One task, if what has just been said is correct, which confronts us in

trying to connect the world of sense with the world of physics, is the

task of reconstructing the conception of matter without the a priori

beliefs which historically gave rise to it. In spite of the

revolutionary results of modern physics, the empirical successes of the

conception of matter show that there must be some legitimate conception

which fulfils roughly the same functions. The time has hardly come when

we can state precisely what this legitimate conception is, but we can

see in a general way what it must be like. For this purpose, it is only

necessary to take our ordinary common-sense statements and reword them

without the assumption of permanent substance. We say, for example, that

things change gradually--sometimes very quickly, but not without passing

through a continuous series of intermediate states. What this means is

that, given any sensible appearance, there will usually be, if we

watch, a continuous series of appearances connected with the given one,

leading on by imperceptible gradations to the new appearances which

common-sense regards as those of the same thing. Thus a thing may be

defined as a certain series of appearances, connected with each other by

continuity and by certain causal laws. In the case of slowly changing

things, this is easily seen. Consider, say, a wall-paper which fades in

the course of years. It is an effort not to conceive of it as one

"thing" whose colour is slightly different at one time from what it is

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at another. But what do we really know about it? We know that under

suitable circumstances--i.e. when we are, as is said, "in the

room"--we perceive certain colours in a certain pattern: not always

precisely the same colours, but sufficiently similar to feel familiar.

If we can state the laws according to which the colour varies, we can

state all that is empirically verifiable; the assumption that there is a

constant entity, the wall-paper, which "has" these various colours at

various times, is a piece of gratuitous metaphysics. We may, if we like,

define the wall-paper as the series of its aspects. These are

collected together by the same motives which led us to regard the

wall-paper as one thing, namely a combination of sensible continuity and

causal connection. More generally, a "thing" will be defined as a

certain series of aspects, namely those which would commonly be said to

be of the thing. To say that a certain aspect is an aspect of a

certain thing will merely mean that it is one of those which, taken

serially, are the thing. Everything will then proceed as before:

whatever was verifiable is unchanged, but our language is so interpreted

as to avoid an unnecessary metaphysical assumption of permanence.

The above extrusion of permanent things affords an example of the maxim

which inspires all scientific philosophising, namely "Occam's razor":

Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity. In other words,

in dealing with any subject-matter, find out what entities are

undeniably involved, and state everything in terms of these entities.

Very often the resulting statement is more complicated and difficult

than one which, like common sense and most philosophy, assumes

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hypothetical entities whose existence there is no good reason to believe

in. We find it easier to imagine a wall-paper with changing colours than

to think merely of the series of colours; but it is a mistake to suppose

that what is easy and natural in thought is what is most free from

unwarrantable assumptions, as the case of "things" very aptly

illustrates.

The above summary account of the genesis of "things," though it may be

correct in outline, has omitted some serious difficulties which it is

necessary briefly to consider. Starting from a world of helter-skelter

sense-data, we wish to collect them into series, each of which can be

regarded as consisting of the successive appearances of one "thing."

There is, to begin with, some conflict between what common sense regards

as one thing, and what physics regards an unchanging collection of

particles. To common sense, a human body is one thing, but to science

the matter composing it is continually changing. This conflict, however,

is not very serious, and may, for our rough preliminary purpose, be

largely ignored. The problem is: by what principles shall we select

certain data from the chaos, and call them all appearances of the same

thing?

A rough and approximate answer to this question is not very difficult.

There are certain fairly stable collections of appearances, such as

landscapes, the furniture of rooms, the faces of acquaintances. In these

cases, we have little hesitation in regarding them on successive

occasions as appearances of one thing or collection of things. But, as

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the Comedy of Errors illustrates, we may be led astray if we judge by

mere resemblance. This shows that something more is involved, for two

different things may have any degree of likeness up to exact similarity.

Another insufficient criterion of one thing is continuity. As we have

already seen, if we watch what we regard as one changing thing, we

usually find its changes to be continuous so far as our senses can

perceive. We are thus led to assume that, if we see two finitely

different appearances at two different times, and if we have reason to

regard them as belonging to the same thing, then there was a continuous

series of intermediate states of that thing during the time when we were

not observing it. And so it comes to be thought that continuity of

change is necessary and sufficient to constitute one thing. But in fact

it is neither. It is not necessary, because the unobserved states, in

the case where our attention has not been concentrated on the thing

throughout, are purely hypothetical, and cannot possibly be our ground

for supposing the earlier and later appearances to belong to the same

thing; on the contrary, it is because we suppose this that we assume

intermediate unobserved states. Continuity is also not sufficient, since

we can, for example, pass by sensibly continuous gradations from any one

drop of the sea to any other drop. The utmost we can say is that

discontinuity during uninterrupted observation is as a rule a mark of

difference between things, though even this cannot be said in such cases

as sudden explosions.

The assumption of continuity is, however, successfully made in physics.

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This proves something, though not anything of very obvious utility to

our present problem: it proves that nothing in the known world is

inconsistent with the hypothesis that all changes are really continuous,

though from too great rapidity or from our lack of observation they may

not always appear continuous. In this hypothetical sense, continuity may

be allowed to be a necessary condition if two appearances are to be

classed as appearances of the same thing. But it is not a sufficient

condition, as appears from the instance of the drops in the sea. Thus

something more must be sought before we can give even the roughest

definition of a "thing."

What is wanted further seems to be something in the nature of fulfilment

of causal laws. This statement, as it stands, is very vague, but we will

endeavour to give it precision. When I speak of "causal laws," I mean

any laws which connect events at different times, or even, as a limiting

case, events at the same time provided the connection is not logically

demonstrable. In this very general sense, the laws of dynamics are

causal laws, and so are the laws correlating the simultaneous

appearances of one "thing" to different senses. The question is: How do

such laws help in the definition of a "thing"?

To answer this question, we must consider what it is that is proved by

the empirical success of physics. What is proved is that its hypotheses,

though unverifiable where they go beyond sense-data, are at no point in

contradiction with sense-data, but, on the contrary, are ideally such as

to render all sense-data calculable from a sufficient collection of data

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all belonging to a given period of time. Now physics has found it

empirically possible to collect sense-data into series, each series

being regarded as belonging to one "thing," and behaving, with regard to

the laws of physics, in a way in which series not belonging to one thing

would in general not behave. If it is to be unambiguous whether two

appearances belong to the same thing or not, there must be only one way

of grouping appearances so that the resulting things obey the laws of

physics. It would be very difficult to prove that this is the case, but

for our present purposes we may let this point pass, and assume that

there is only one way. We must include in our definition of a "thing"

those of its aspects, if any, which are not observed. Thus we may lay

down the following definition: Things are those series of aspects which

obey the laws of physics. That such series exist is an empirical fact,

which constitutes the verifiability of physics.

It may still be objected that the "matter" of physics is something other

than series of sense-data. Sense-data, it may be said, belong to

psychology and are, at any rate in some sense, subjective, whereas

physics is quite independent of psychological considerations, and does

not assume that its matter only exists when it is perceived.

To this objection there are two answers, both of some importance.

(a) We have been considering, in the above account, the question of the

verifiability of physics. Now verifiability is by no means the same

thing as truth; it is, in fact, something far more subjective and

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psychological. For a proposition to be verifiable, it is not enough that

it should be true, but it must also be such as we can discover to be

true. Thus verifiability depends upon our capacity for acquiring

knowledge, and not only upon the objective truth. In physics, as

ordinarily set forth, there is much that is unverifiable: there are

hypotheses as to (α) how things would appear to a spectator in a place

where, as it happens, there is no spectator; (β) how things would appear

at times when, in fact, they are not appearing to anyone; (γ) things

which never appear at all. All these are introduced to simplify the

statement of the causal laws, but none of them form an integral part of

what is known to be true in physics. This brings us to our second

answer.

(b) If physics is to consist wholly of propositions known to be true, or

at least capable of being proved or disproved, the three kinds of

hypothetical entities we have just enumerated must all be capable of

being exhibited as logical functions of sense-data. In order to show how

this might possibly be done, let us recall the hypothetical Leibnizian

universe of Lecture III. In that universe, we had a number of

perspectives, two of which never had any entity in common, but often

contained entities which could be sufficiently correlated to be regarded

as belonging to the same thing. We will call one of these an "actual"

private world when there is an actual spectator to which it appears, and

"ideal" when it is merely constructed on principles of continuity. A

physical thing consists, at each instant, of the whole set of its

aspects at that instant, in all the different worlds; thus a momentary

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state of a thing is a whole set of aspects. An "ideal" appearance will

be an aspect merely calculated, but not actually perceived by any

spectator. An "ideal" state of a thing will be a state at a moment when

all its appearances are ideal. An ideal thing will be one whose states

at all times are ideal. Ideal appearances, states, and things, since

they are calculated, must be functions of actual appearances, states,

and things; in fact, ultimately, they must be functions of actual

appearances. Thus it is unnecessary, for the enunciation of the laws of

physics, to assign any reality to ideal elements: it is enough to accept

them as logical constructions, provided we have means of knowing how to

determine when they become actual. This, in fact, we have with some

degree of approximation; the starry heaven, for instance, becomes actual

whenever we choose to look at it. It is open to us to believe that the

ideal elements exist, and there can be no reason for disbelieving

this; but unless in virtue of some a priori law we cannot know it,

for empirical knowledge is confined to what we actually observe.

(2) The three main conceptions of physics are space, time, and matter.

Some of the problems raised by the conception of matter have been

indicated in the above discussion of "things." But space and time also

raise difficult problems of much the same kind, namely, difficulties in

reducing the haphazard untidy world of immediate sensation to the smooth

orderly world of geometry and kinematics. Let us begin with the

consideration of space.

People who have never read any psychology seldom realise how much mental

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labour has gone into the construction of the one all-embracing space

into which all sensible objects are supposed to fit. Kant, who was

unusually ignorant of psychology, described space as "an infinite given

whole," whereas a moment's psychological reflection shows that a space

which is infinite is not given, while a space which can be called given

is not infinite. What the nature of "given" space really is, is a

difficult question, upon which psychologists are by no means agreed. But

some general remarks may be made, which will suffice to show the

problems, without taking sides on any psychological issue still in

debate.

The first thing to notice is that different senses have different

spaces. The space of sight is quite different from the space of touch:

it is only by experience in infancy that we learn to correlate them. In

later life, when we see an object within reach, we know how to touch it,

and more or less what it will feel like; if we touch an object with our

eyes shut, we know where we should have to look for it, and more or less

what it would look like. But this knowledge is derived from early

experience of the correlation of certain kinds of touch-sensations with

certain kinds of sight-sensations. The one space into which both kinds

of sensations fit is an intellectual construction, not a datum. And

besides touch and sight, there are other kinds of sensation which give

other, though less important spaces: these also have to be fitted into

the one space by means of experienced correlations. And as in the case

of things, so here: the one all-embracing space, though convenient as a

way of speaking, need not be supposed really to exist. All that

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experience makes certain is the several spaces of the several senses,

correlated by empirically discovered laws. The one space may turn out to

be valid as a logical construction, compounded of the several spaces,

but there is no good reason to assume its independent metaphysical

reality.

Another respect in which the spaces of immediate experience differ from

the space of geometry and physics is in regard to points. The space of

geometry and physics consists of an infinite number of points, but no

one has ever seen or touched a point. If there are points in a sensible

space, they must be an inference. It is not easy to see any way in

which, as independent entities, they could be validly inferred from the

data; thus here again, we shall have, if possible, to find some logical

construction, some complex assemblage of immediately given objects,

which will have the geometrical properties required of points. It is

customary to think of points as simple and infinitely small, but

geometry in no way demands that we should think of them in this way. All

that is necessary for geometry is that they should have mutual relations

possessing certain enumerated abstract properties, and it may be that an

assemblage of data of sensation will serve this purpose. Exactly how

this is to be done, I do not yet know, but it seems fairly certain that

it can be done.

The following illustrative method, simplified so as to be easily

manipulated, has been invented by Dr Whitehead for the purpose of

showing how points might be manufactured from sense-data. We have first

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of all to observe that there are no infinitesimal sense-data: any

surface we can see, for example, must be of some finite extent. But what

at first appears as one undivided whole is often found, under the

influence of attention, to split up into parts contained within the

whole. Thus one spatial object may be contained within another, and

entirely enclosed by the other. This relation of enclosure, by the help

of some very natural hypotheses, will enable us to define a "point" as a

certain class of spatial objects, namely all those (as it will turn out

in the end) which would naturally be said to contain the point. In order

to obtain a definition of a "point" in this way, we proceed as follows:

Given any set of volumes or surfaces, they will not in general converge

into one point. But if they get smaller and smaller, while of any two of

the set there is always one that encloses the other, then we begin to

have the kind of conditions which would enable us to treat them as

having a point for their limit. The hypotheses required for the relation

of enclosure are that (1) it must be transitive; (2) of two different

spatial objects, it is impossible for each to enclose the other, but a

single spatial object always encloses itself; (3) any set of spatial

objects such that there is at least one spatial object enclosed by them

all has a lower limit or minimum, i.e. an object enclosed by all of

them and enclosing all objects which are enclosed by all of them; (4) to

prevent trivial exceptions, we must add that there are to be instances

of enclosure, i.e. there are really to be objects of which one

encloses the other. When an enclosure-relation has these properties, we

will call it a "point-producer." Given any relation of enclosure, we

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will call a set of objects an "enclosure-series" if, of any two of them,

one is contained in the other. We require a condition which shall secure

that an enclosure-series converges to a point, and this is obtained as

follows: Let our enclosure-series be such that, given any other

enclosure-series of which there are members enclosed in any arbitrarily

chosen member of our first series, then there are members of our first

series enclosed in any arbitrarily chosen member of our second series.

In this case, our first enclosure-series may be called a "punctual

enclosure-series." Then a "point" is all the objects which enclose

members of a given punctual enclosure-series. In order to ensure

infinite divisibility, we require one further property to be added to

those defining point-producers, namely that any object which encloses

itself also encloses an object other than itself. The "points" generated

by point-producers with this property will be found to be such as

geometry requires.

(3) The question of time, so long as we confine ourselves to one private

world, is rather less complicated than that of space, and we can see

pretty clearly how it might be dealt with by such methods as we have

been considering. Events of which we are conscious do not last merely

for a mathematical instant, but always for some finite time, however

short. Even if there be a physical world such as the mathematical theory

of motion supposes, impressions on our sense-organs produce sensations

which are not merely and strictly instantaneous, and therefore the

objects of sense of which we are immediately conscious are not strictly

instantaneous. Instants, therefore, are not among the data of

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experience, and, if legitimate, must be either inferred or constructed.

It is difficult to see how they can be validly inferred; thus we are

left with the alternative that they must be constructed. How is this to

be done?

Immediate experience provides us with two time-relations among events:

they may be simultaneous, or one may be earlier and the other later.

These two are both part of the crude data; it is not the case that only

the events are given, and their time-order is added by our subjective

activity. The time-order, within certain limits, is as much given as the

events. In any story of adventure you will find such passages as the

following: "With a cynical smile he pointed the revolver at the breast

of the dauntless youth. 'At the word three I shall fire,' he said. The

words one and two had already been spoken with a cool and deliberate

distinctness. The word three was forming on his lips. At this moment a

blinding flash of lightning rent the air." Here we have

simultaneity--not due, as Kant would have us believe, to the subjective

mental apparatus of the dauntless youth, but given as objectively as the

revolver and the lightning. And it is equally given in immediate

experience that the words one and two come earlier than the flash.

These time-relations hold between events which are not strictly

instantaneous. Thus one event may begin sooner than another, and

therefore be before it, but may continue after the other has begun, and

therefore be also simultaneous with it. If it persists after the other

is over, it will also be later than the other. Earlier, simultaneous,

and later, are not inconsistent with each other when we are concerned

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with events which last for a finite time, however short; they only

become inconsistent when we are dealing with something instantaneous.

It is to be observed that we cannot give what may be called absolute

dates, but only dates determined by events. We cannot point to a time

itself, but only to some event occurring at that time. There is

therefore no reason in experience to suppose that there are times as

opposed to events: the events, ordered by the relations of simultaneity

and succession, are all that experience provides. Hence, unless we are

to introduce superfluous metaphysical entities, we must, in defining

what mathematical physics can regard as an instant, proceed by means of

some construction which assumes nothing beyond events and their temporal

relations.

If we wish to assign a date exactly by means of events, how shall we

proceed? If we take any one event, we cannot assign our date exactly,

because the event is not instantaneous, that is to say, it may be

simultaneous with two events which are not simultaneous with each other.

In order to assign a date exactly, we must be able, theoretically, to

determine whether any given event is before, at, or after this date, and

we must know that any other date is either before or after this date,

but not simultaneous with it. Suppose, now, instead of taking one event

A, we take two events A and B, and suppose A and B partly overlap, but B

ends before A ends. Then an event which is simultaneous with both A and

B must exist during the time when A and B overlap; thus we have come

rather nearer to a precise date than when we considered A and B alone.

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Let C be an event which is simultaneous with both A and B, but which

ends before either A or B has ended. Then an event which is simultaneous

with A and B and C must exist during the time when all three overlap,

which is a still shorter time. Proceeding in this way, by taking more

and more events, a new event which is dated as simultaneous with all of

them becomes gradually more and more accurately dated. This suggests a

way by which a completely accurate date can be defined.

Let us take a group of events of which any two overlap, so that there is

some time, however short, when they all exist. If there is any other

event which is simultaneous with all of these, let us add it to the

group; let us go on until we have constructed a group such that no event

outside the group is simultaneous with all of them, but all the events

inside the group are simultaneous with each other. Let us define this

whole group as an instant of time. It remains to show that it has the

properties we expect of an instant.

What are the properties we expect of instants? First, they must form a

series: of any two, one must be before the other, and the other must be

not before the one; if one is before another, and the other before a

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third, the first must be before the third. Secondly, every event must be

at a certain number of instants; two events are simultaneous if they are

at the same instant, and one is before the other if there is an instant,

at which the one is, which is earlier than some instant at which the

other is. Thirdly, if we assume that there is always some change going

on somewhere during the time when any given event persists, the series

of instants ought to be compact, i.e. given any two instants, there

ought to be other instants between them. Do instants, as we have defined

them, have these properties?

We shall say that an event is "at" an instant when it is a member of the

group by which the instant is constituted; and we shall say that one

instant is before another if the group which is the one instant contains

an event which is earlier than, but not simultaneous with, some event in

the group which is the other instant. When one event is earlier than,

but not simultaneous with another, we shall say that it "wholly

precedes" the other. Now we know that of two events which are not

simultaneous, there must be one which wholly precedes the other, and in

that case the other cannot also wholly precede the one; we also know

that, if one event wholly precedes another, and the other wholly

precedes a third, then the first wholly precedes the third. From these

facts it is easy to deduce that the instants as we have defined them

form a series.

We have next to show that every event is "at" at least one instant,

i.e. that, given any event, there is at least one class, such as we

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used in defining instants, of which it is a member. For this purpose,

consider all the events which are simultaneous with a given event, and

do not begin later, i.e. are not wholly after anything simultaneous

with it. We will call these the "initial contemporaries" of the given

event. It will be found that this class of events is the first instant

at which the given event exists, provided every event wholly after some

contemporary of the given event is wholly after some initial

contemporary of it.

Finally, the series of instants will be compact if, given any two events

of which one wholly precedes the other, there are events wholly after

the one and simultaneous with something wholly before the other. Whether

this is the case or not, is an empirical question; but if it is not,

there is no reason to expect the time-series to be compact.[17]

[17] The assumptions made concerning time-relations in the above are

as follows:--

I. In order to secure that instants form a series, we assume:

(a) No event wholly precedes itself. (An "event" is defined as

whatever is simultaneous with something or other.)

(b) If one event wholly precedes another, and the other wholly

precedes a third, then the first wholly precedes the third.

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 (c) If one event wholly precedes another, it is not simultaneous

with it.

(d) Of two events which are not simultaneous, one must wholly

precede the other.

II. In order to secure that the initial contemporaries of a given

event should form an instant, we assume:

(e) An event wholly after some contemporary of a given event is

wholly after some initial contemporary of the given event.

III. In order to secure that the series of instants shall be

compact, we assume:

(f) If one event wholly precedes another, there is an event wholly

after the one and simultaneous with something wholly before the

other.

This assumption entails the consequence that if one event covers the

whole of a stretch of time immediately preceding another event, then

it must have at least one instant in common with the other event;

i.e. it is impossible for one event to cease just before another

begins. I do not know whether this should be regarded as inadmissible.

For a mathematico-logical treatment of the above topics, cf. N.

Wilner, "A Contribution to the Theory of Relative Position," Proc.

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 Camb. Phil. Soc., xvii. 5, pp. 441-449.

Thus our definition of instants secures all that mathematics requires,

without having to assume the existence of any disputable metaphysical

entities.

Instants may also be defined by means of the enclosure-relation, exactly

as was done in the case of points. One object will be temporally

enclosed by another when it is simultaneous with the other, but not

before or after it. Whatever encloses temporally or is enclosed

temporally we shall call an "event." In order that the relation of

temporal enclosure may be a "point-producer," we require (1) that it

should be transitive, i.e. that if one event encloses another, and the

other a third, then the first encloses the third; (2) that every event

encloses itself, but if one event encloses another different event, then

the other does not enclose the one; (3) that given any set of events

such that there is at least one event enclosed by all of them, then

there is an event enclosing all that they all enclose, and itself

enclosed by all of them; (4) that there is at least one event. To ensure

infinite divisibility, we require also that every event should enclose

events other than itself. Assuming these characteristics, temporal

enclosure is an infinitely divisible point-producer. We can now form an

"enclosure-series" of events, by choosing a group of events such that of

any two there is one which encloses the other; this will be a "punctual

enclosure-series" if, given any other enclosure-series such that every

member of our first series encloses some member of our second, then

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every member of our second series encloses some member of our first.

Then an "instant" is the class of all events which enclose members of a

given punctual enclosure-series.

The correlation of the times of different private worlds so as to

produce the one all-embracing time of physics is a more difficult

matter. We saw, in Lecture III., that different private worlds often

contain correlated appearances, such as common sense would regard as

appearances of the same "thing." When two appearances in different

worlds are so correlated as to belong to one momentary "state" of a

thing, it would be natural to regard them as simultaneous, and as thus

affording a simple means of correlating different private times. But

this can only be regarded as a first approximation. What we call one

sound will be heard sooner by people near the source of the sound than

by people further from it, and the same applies, though in a less

degree, to light. Thus two correlated appearances in different worlds

are not necessarily to be regarded as occurring at the same date in

physical time, though they will be parts of one momentary state of a

thing. The correlation of different private times is regulated by the

desire to secure the simplest possible statement of the laws of physics,

and thus raises rather complicated technical problems; but from the

point of view of philosophical theory, there is no very serious

difficulty of principle involved.

The above brief outline must not be regarded as more than tentative and

suggestive. It is intended merely to show the kind of way in which,

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given a world with the kind of properties that psychologists find in the

world of sense, it may be possible, by means of purely logical

constructions, to make it amenable to mathematical treatment by defining

series or classes of sense-data which can be called respectively

particles, points, and instants. If such constructions are possible,

then mathematical physics is applicable to the real world, in spite of

the fact that its particles, points, and instants are not to be found

among actually existing entities.

The problem which the above considerations are intended to elucidate is

one whose importance and even existence has been concealed by the

unfortunate separation of different studies which prevails throughout

the civilised world. Physicists, ignorant and contemptuous of

philosophy, have been content to assume their particles, points, and

instants in practice, while conceding, with ironical politeness, that

their concepts laid no claim to metaphysical validity. Metaphysicians,

obsessed by the idealistic opinion that only mind is real, and the

Parmenidean belief that the real is unchanging, repeated one after

another the supposed contradictions in the notions of matter, space, and

time, and therefore naturally made no endeavour to invent a tenable

theory of particles, points, and instants. Psychologists, who have done

invaluable work in bringing to light the chaotic nature of the crude

materials supplied by unmanipulated sensation, have been ignorant of

mathematics and modern logic, and have therefore been content to say

that matter, space, and time are "intellectual constructions," without

making any attempt to show in detail either how the intellect can

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construct them, or what secures the practical validity which physics

shows them to possess. Philosophers, it is to be hoped, will come to

recognise that they cannot achieve any solid success in such problems

without some slight knowledge of logic, mathematics, and physics;

meanwhile, for want of students with the necessary equipment, this vital

problem remains unattempted and unknown.

There are, it is true, two authors, both physicists, who have done

something, though not much, to bring about a recognition of the problem

as one demanding study. These two authors are Poincaré and Mach,

Poincaré especially in his Science and Hypothesis, Mach especially in

his Analysis of Sensations. Both of them, however, admirable as their

work is, seem to me to suffer from a general philosophical bias.

Poincaré is Kantian, while Mach is ultra-empiricist; with Poincaré

almost all the mathematical part of physics is merely conventional,

while with Mach the sensation as a mental event is identified with its

object as a part of the physical world. Nevertheless, both these

authors, and especially Mach, deserve mention as having made serious

contributions to the consideration of our problem.

When a point or an instant is defined as a class of sensible qualities,

the first impression produced is likely to be one of wild and wilful

paradox. Certain considerations apply here, however, which will again be

relevant when we come to the definition of numbers. There is a whole

type of problems which can be solved by such definitions, and almost

always there will be at first an effect of paradox. Given a set of

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objects any two of which have a relation of the sort called "symmetrical

and transitive," it is almost certain that we shall come to regard them

as all having some common quality, or as all having the same relation to

some one object outside the set. This kind of case is important, and I

shall therefore try to make it clear even at the cost of some repetition

of previous definitions.

A relation is said to be "symmetrical" when, if one term has this

relation to another, then the other also has it to the one. Thus

"brother or sister" is a "symmetrical" relation: if one person is a

brother or a sister of another, then the other is a brother or sister of

the one. Simultaneity, again, is a symmetrical relation; so is equality

in size. A relation is said to be "transitive" when, if one term has

this relation to another, and the other to a third, then the one has it

to the third. The symmetrical relations mentioned just now are also

transitive--provided, in the case of "brother or sister," we allow a

person to be counted as his or her own brother or sister, and provided,

in the case of simultaneity, we mean complete simultaneity, i.e.

beginning and ending together.

But many relations are transitive without being symmetrical--for

instance, such relations as "greater," "earlier," "to the right of,"

"ancestor of," in fact all such relations as give rise to series. Other

relations are symmetrical without being transitive--for example,

difference in any respect. If A is of a different age from B, and B of a

different age from C, it does not follow that A is of a different age

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from C. Simultaneity, again, in the case of events which last for a

finite time, will not necessarily be transitive if it only means that

the times of the two events overlap. If A ends just after B has begun,

and B ends just after C has begun, A and B will be simultaneous in this

sense, and so will B and C, but A and C may well not be simultaneous.

All the relations which can naturally be represented as equality in any

respect, or as possession of a common property, are transitive and

symmetrical--this applies, for example, to such relations as being of

the same height or weight or colour. Owing to the fact that possession

of a common property gives rise to a transitive symmetrical relation, we

come to imagine that wherever such a relation occurs it must be due to a

common property. "Being equally numerous" is a transitive symmetrical

relation of two collections; hence we imagine that both have a common

property, called their number. "Existing at a given instant" (in the

sense in which we defined an instant) is a transitive symmetrical

relation; hence we come to think that there really is an instant which

confers a common property on all the things existing at that instant.

"Being states of a given thing" is a transitive symmetrical relation;

hence we come to imagine that there really is a thing, other than the

series of states, which accounts for the transitive symmetrical

relation. In all such cases, the class of terms that have the given

transitive symmetrical relation to a given term will fulfil all the

formal requisites of a common property of all the members of the class.

Since there certainly is the class, while any other common property may

be illusory, it is prudent, in order to avoid needless assumptions, to

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substitute the class for the common property which would be ordinarily

assumed. This is the reason for the definitions we have adopted, and

this is the source of the apparent paradoxes. No harm is done if there

are such common properties as language assumes, since we do not deny

them, but merely abstain from asserting them. But if there are not such

common properties in any given case, then our method has secured us

against error. In the absence of special knowledge, therefore, the

method we have adopted is the only one which is safe, and which avoids

the risk of introducing fictitious metaphysical entities.

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LECTURE V

THE THEORY OF CONTINUITY

The theory of continuity, with which we shall be occupied in the present

lecture, is, in most of its refinements and developments, a purely

mathematical subject--very beautiful, very important, and very

delightful, but not, strictly speaking, a part of philosophy. The

logical basis of the theory alone belongs to philosophy, and alone will

occupy us to-night. The way the problem of continuity enters into

philosophy is, broadly speaking, the following: Space and time are

treated by mathematicians as consisting of points and instants, but they

also have a property, easier to feel than to define, which is called

continuity, and is thought by many philosophers to be destroyed when

they are resolved into points and instants. Zeno, as we shall see,

proved that analysis into points and instants was impossible if we

adhered to the view that the number of points or instants in a finite

space or time must be finite. Later philosophers, believing infinite

number to be self-contradictory, have found here an antinomy: Spaces and

times could not consist of a finite number of points and instants, for

such reasons as Zeno's; they could not consist of an infinite number

of points and instants, because infinite numbers were supposed to be

self-contradictory. Therefore spaces and times, if real at all, must not

be regarded as composed of points and instants.

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But even when points and instants, as independent entities, are

discarded, as they were by the theory advocated in our last lecture, the

problems of continuity, as I shall try to show presently, remain, in a

practically unchanged form. Let us therefore, to begin with, admit

points and instants, and consider the problems in connection with this

simpler or at least more familiar hypothesis.

The argument against continuity, in so far as it rests upon the supposed

difficulties of infinite numbers, has been disposed of by the positive

theory of the infinite, which will be considered in Lecture VII. But

there remains a feeling--of the kind that led Zeno to the contention

that the arrow in its flight is at rest--which suggests that points and

instants, even if they are infinitely numerous, can only give a jerky

motion, a succession of different immobilities, not the smooth

transitions with which the senses have made us familiar. This feeling is

due, I believe, to a failure to realise imaginatively, as well as

abstractly, the nature of continuous series as they appear in

mathematics. When a theory has been apprehended logically, there is

often a long and serious labour still required in order to feel it: it

is necessary to dwell upon it, to thrust out from the mind, one by one,

the misleading suggestions of false but more familiar theories, to

acquire the kind of intimacy which, in the case of a foreign language,

would enable us to think and dream in it, not merely to construct

laborious sentences by the help of grammar and dictionary. It is, I

believe, the absence of this kind of intimacy which makes many

philosophers regard the mathematical doctrine of continuity as an

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inadequate explanation of the continuity which we experience in the

world of sense.

In the present lecture, I shall first try to explain in outline what the

mathematical theory of continuity is in its philosophically important

essentials. The application to actual space and time will not be in

question to begin with. I do not see any reason to suppose that the

points and instants which mathematicians introduce in dealing with space

and time are actual physically existing entities, but I do see reason to

suppose that the continuity of actual space and time may be more or less

analogous to mathematical continuity. The theory of mathematical

continuity is an abstract logical theory, not dependent for its validity

upon any properties of actual space and time. What is claimed for it is

that, when it is understood, certain characteristics of space and time,

previously very hard to analyse, are found not to present any logical

difficulty. What we know empirically about space and time is

insufficient to enable us to decide between various mathematically

possible alternatives, but these alternatives are all fully intelligible

and fully adequate to the observed facts. For the present, however, it

will be well to forget space and time and the continuity of sensible

change, in order to return to these topics equipped with the weapons

provided by the abstract theory of continuity.