SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM. 797 



lastic realism — realism as intense and unmitigated as that of Scotus 

 Erigena a thousand years ago. The essence of such realism is that it 

 maintains the objective existence of universals, or, as we call them 

 nowadays, general propositions. It affirms, for example, that "man" 

 is a real thing, apart from individual men, having its existence, not in 

 the sensible but in the intelligible world, and clothing itself with the 

 accidents of sense to make the Jack and Tom and Harry whom we 

 know. Strange as such a notion may appear to modern scientific 

 thought, it really pervades ordinary language. There are few people 

 who would, at once, hesitate to admit that color, for example, exists 

 apart from the mind which conceives the idea of color. They hold 

 it to be something which resides in the colored object; and so far they 

 are as much realists as if they had sat at Plato's feet. Reflection 

 on the facts of the case must, I imagine, convince every one that 

 " color " is — not a mere name, which was the extreme Nominalist po- 

 sition — but a name for that group of states of feeling which we call 

 blue, red, yellow, and so on, and which we believe to be caused by 

 luminiferous vibrations which have not the slightest resemblance to 

 color ; while these, again, are set afoot by states of the body to which 

 we ascribe color, but which are equally devoid of likeness to color. 



In the same way, a law of Nature, in the scientific sense, is the 

 product of a mental operation upon the facts of Nature which come 

 under our observation, and has no more existence outside the mind 

 than color has. The law of gravitation is a statement of the manner 

 in which experience shows that bodies, which are free to move, do, in 

 fact, move toward another. But the other facts of observation, that 

 bodies are not always moving in this fashion, and sometimes move in 

 a contrary direction, are implied in the words "free to move." If it 

 is a law of Nature that bodies tend to move toward one another in a 

 certain way, it is another and no less true law of Nature that, if bodies 

 are not free to move as they tend to do, either in consequence of an 

 obstacle or of a contrary impulse from some other source of energy 

 than that to which we give the name of gravitation, they either stop 

 still or go another way. 



Scientifically speaking, it is the acme of absurdity to talk of a man 

 defying the law of gravitation when he lifts his arm. The general 

 store of energy in the universe working through terrestrial matter is 

 doubtless tending to bring the man's arm down ; but the particular 

 fraction of that energy which is working through certain of his nerv- 

 ous and muscular organs is tending to drive it up, and, more energy 

 being expended on the arm in the upward than in the downward direc- 

 tion, the arm goes up accordingly. But the law of gravitation is no 

 more defied in this case than when a grocer throws so much sugar into 

 the empty pan of his scales that the weighted one kicks the beam. 



The tenacity of the wonderful fallacy that the laws of Nature are 

 agents instead of being, as they really are, a mere record of experience, 



