304 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



prove his proposition. Granting, by way of waiver, that such a theory 

 is intelligible and is more than a nonsensical juxtaposition of terms, so 

 far from helping Professor Pearson's contention at all, the acceptance 

 of it would at once decide the case against him, as every student of the 

 Critic of the Pure Reason will at once perceive. For the theory sets the 

 rationality in nature upon a rock perfectly impregnable by you, me or 

 any company of men. 



Although that theory is only problematically put forth by Professor 

 Pearson, yet at the very outset of his argumentation he insists upon the 

 relativity of regularity to our faculties, as if that were in some way 

 pertinent to the question. "Our law of tides/' he says, "could have 

 no meaning for a blind worm on the shore, for whom the moon had no 

 existence." Quite so; but would that truism in any manner help to 

 prove that the moon was a figment and no reality? On the contrary, 

 it could only help to show that there may be more things in heaven 

 and earth than your philosophy has dreamed of. Now the moon, on 

 the one hand, and the law of the tides, on the other, stand in entirely 

 analogous positions relatively to the remark, which can no more help 

 to prove the unreality of the one than of the other. So, too, the final 

 decisive stroke of the whole argumentation consists in urging substan- 

 tially the same idea in the terrible shape of a syllogism, which the reader 

 may examine in section 11. I will make no comment upon it. 



Professor Pearson's argumentation rests upon three legs. The first 

 is the fact that both our perceptive and our reflective faculties reject 

 part of what is presented to them, and 'sort out' the rest. Upon that, 

 I remark that our minds are not, and cannot be, positively mendacious. 

 To suppose them so is to misunderstand what we all mean by truth and 

 reality. Our eyes tell us that some things in nature are red and others 

 blue; and so they really are. For the real world is the world of insistent 

 generalized percepts. It is true that the best physical idea which we can 

 at present fit to the real world, has nothing but longer and shorter 

 waves to correspond to red and blue. But this is evidently owing to 

 the acknowledged circumstance that the physical theory is to the last 

 degree incomplete, if not to its being, no doubt, in some measure, errone- 

 ous. For surely the completed theory will have to account for the 

 extraordinary contrast between red and blue. In a word, it is the 

 business of a physical theory to account for the percepts; and it would 

 be absurd to accuse the percepts — that is to say, the facts — of mendacity 

 because they do not square with the theory. 



The second leg of the argumentation is that the mind projects its 

 worked-over impressions into an object, and then projects into that 

 object the comparisons, etc., that are the results of its own work. I 

 admit, of course, that errors and delusions are everyday phenomena, and 

 hallucinations not rare. We have just three means at our command for 



