134 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



outfit may have only decided the route of thought without affecting its 

 final goal. But it is also possible that its position in the general organisation 

 of reality may permanently limit or qualify its knowledge. It is conceivable 

 that the human mind is so placed in the cosmos and so dominated from 

 experience derived from that placing that it is confined to knowledge which 

 is analogically derivable from its primary models of reality. 



Our general physical position in reality, represented by our body, and 

 distinguished from our particular locality on the earth's surface, is inter- 

 mediate between the vastness of great objects like Jupiter and the minuteness 

 of small objects like motes and bacteria. There is a similar intermediateness 

 in our psychical position. We grasp most easily, according to Bertrand 

 Russell, those conceptions which are logically neither very complex nor very 

 simple. 1 According to Lossky, our knowledge mainly hovers between minute 

 detail and wide generality. No single science, he remarks, has yet completed 

 the ascent of knowledge to the highest generality or the descent to the 

 lowest. The " medium universal " is most clearly discriminated by the 

 human mind ; the universal is not clearly connected in consciousness ; 

 unique individual events are apprehended through their aspects which are 

 similar to those of other events, and detailed, minutely particular knowledge 

 of individual things is very rare.- 



We are impelled by our general psycho-physical position in the universe 

 to search for more microscopic aspects than are contained in our primary, 

 more macroscopic vision of things. We see objects which, roughly speaking, 

 are big enough to clutch, and we touch or hear objects which compel us to 

 speculate on their minuter parts. If our physical size placed us as directly 

 in mental touch with the microscopic details of matter as it actually places 

 us in direct mental contact with more macroscopic aspects, if we sensed 

 molecules and atoms or particles approaching molecular magnitudes instead 

 of sensing larger objects, if we lived and moved among corpuscles as we 

 now live and move among trees and stones, our primary version of this 

 world might, by providing a new point of mental departure, transform, for 

 us, the whole field of knowledge. All our attempts to conceive the microscopic 

 structure of matter may be too rigidly controlled by the assumption that 

 gross bodies are composed of parts which, in essence, are miniatures of 

 themselves. The microscopic aspects of matter may not be like the grosser 

 aspects. Our psycho-physical position in the universe imposes upon us, as 

 a fundamental model of reality, the physical thing as we sense or apprehend 

 it. If we are analogically tied to these macroscopic models our version of 

 the microscopic world may always remain relative to our point of mental 

 departure, and always be a more or less successful method of thinking without 

 any actual grasp of reality. 



Professor Whitehead is anxious to keep " nature " for the physicist and 

 the physical philosopher out of the clutches of the epistemologist and the 

 metaphysician. They are to have their turn, and they must be consulted 

 for the final interpretation of reality, but in the " philosophy of science " 

 they are interlopers who distract the inquirer from his proper task. It 

 seems doubtful, however, whether his success corresponds to his anxiety 

 either in his ability to achieve a " Concept of Nature " purified from epistemo- 

 logical items or in his attempt to vindicate the principle that we should and 

 can discuss nature and our knowledge of it without reference to our own role 

 as knowers. 



It is pleasant to simplify and very often temporarily effective. It is 

 simpler, and much less distracting, to forget that the nature " which we 

 observe in perception through the senses " is perceived by percipients and 

 known by knowers. It avoids troublesome suggestions and possibilities that 



1 Introd. to Math. Phil., p. 2. 



2 The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge (Duddington's trans.), pp. 291-302. 



