278 REALITY 



from the experience of our ancestors, partly by scientific 

 comparison and reasoning. By this very indirect and 

 hypothetical inference all our supposed acquaintance 

 with and our theories of a world outside us have been 

 built up. We are acquainted with an external world 

 because its fibres run into our consciousness; it is only 

 our own ends of the fibres that we actually know; from 

 those ends we more or less successfully reconstruct the 

 rest, as a palaeontologist reconstructs an extinct monster 

 from its footprint. 



The mind-stuff is the aggregation of relations and 

 relata which form the building material for the physical 

 world. Our account of the building process shows, 

 however, that much that is implied in the relations is 

 dropped as unserviceable for the required building. 

 Our view is practically that urged in 1875 by W. K. 

 Clifford— 



"The succession of feelings which constitutes a man's 

 consciousness is the reality which produces in our minds 

 the perception of the motions of his brain." 



That is to say, that which the man himself knows as 

 a succession of feelings is the reality which when probed 

 by the appliances of an outside investigator affects their 

 readings in such a way that it is identified as a configura- 

 tion of brain-matter. Again Bertrand Russell writes — * 



What the physiologist sees when he examines a brain is in the 

 physiologist, not in the brain he is examining. What is in the 

 brain by the time the physiologist examines it if it is dead, I do 

 not profess to know; but while its owner was alive, part, at least, 

 of the contents of his brain consisted of his percepts, thoughts, 

 and feelings. Since his brain also consisted of electrons, we are 

 compelled to conclude that an electron is a grouping of events, 



* Analysis of Matter, p. 320. 



