364 THE REAL WORLD 



gh'en by Churchman— I hold that I can legitimately speak of the ob- 

 jective structure of the real world. 



In one sense, the "progress" of modern philosophy has been to show 

 that the [cosmologic] objectives of science are not attainable. But 

 there is a viewpoint, typically modern, that to say an objective is un- 

 attainable is not the same thing as saying the objecti>^e does not exist. 

 This viewpoint would insist that an objective that may be approached 

 within any given distance, however small, exists, even though it can 

 never be reached. 



. . . those questions that are answerable [in an absolute sense] 

 should be answered after an infinity of steps in the process of learn- 

 ing. To make such a concept clear, we might say that the absolute 

 answers are the limits of an infinite series of experiments or ob- 

 servations. 



If my view be granted: why should it be? Why not assume that, 

 always, everything is completely hallucinatory? St. Thomas rejected 

 that assumption out of faith that it was not to deceive man that God 

 gave him his senses. I reject the assumption for no stronger reason 

 than that— if not, following Moore, completely incredible— it is at the 

 very least incredibly uninteresting. I cannot then compel assent to my 

 assumption that sensory experience is not purely hallucinatory, nor 

 to the pair of more special postulates that might justify acceptance 

 of the view above expressed. 



Our sensory experience is evoked by a cosmos the complexity of 

 which is not incommensurate with the potential power of human 

 comprehension. 



The structure of scientific theories is determined by sensory ex- 

 perience and by a human sense of rationality indefinitely educable 

 under the tutelage of experience. 



Simply more explicit statements of what is already implicit in the 

 principle of intelligibility, these postulates seem amply justified by 

 two species of considerations. 



First: The postulates are meaningful because falsifiable— for ex- 

 ample, through a development of the sort Noyes considers probable. 



... I have a strong feeling that from now on the mathematical 

 models of theoretical physics are unlikely to be unique, and the adop- 



