126 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS SECTION F. 



principles are beyond question, and that scientific concepts, as 

 such, are the most certain and indubitable, but that reality and 

 the only reality consists in the things or entities which form the 

 general subject-matter of science. From this point of view what 

 is most real in the universe is such things as matter, molecules, 

 atoms, electrons, ether, whereas feelings, sensations, thoughts, 

 volitions are unreal or relatively unreal — they are only our 

 awareness or consciousness of reality. But from the philoso- 

 phical standpoint consciousness or actual individual experience 

 is the indubitable reality. Accordingly, if Dhilosophy and science 

 are ever to be brought together, some wav must be found of 

 interpreting consciousness or the conditions of consciousness and 

 the matter and so forth of the scientist in terms of each other 

 oi in their essential relations to each other. As Ber- 

 trand Russell says, " Men of science, for the most part, 

 are willing to condemn immediate data as ' merely sub- 

 jective,' while yet maintaining the truth of the physics 

 inferred from those data. But such an attitude, though 

 it may be capable of justification, obviously stands in need 

 of it ; and the only justification possible must be one which ex- 

 presses matter as a logical construction from sense-data. "^° And 

 again : " //; so far as science is verifiable, it must be capable of 

 interpretation in terms of actual sense-data alone. The reason 

 for this is simple. Verification consists always in the occurrence 

 of an expected sense-datum. Now if an expected sense-datum 

 constitutes a verification, what was asserted must have been 

 about sense-data; or, at any rate, if part of what was asserted 

 was not about sense-data, then only the other part has been veri- 

 fied."" 



Now philosophy consists distinctively in the effort to begin, 

 in all inquiry, irom our actual or concrete experience. What 

 is most real, or at least most indubitable, for us is our immediate 

 experience — our sense-impressions and feelings, along with the 

 impulses or efforts which are their active expressions. Exper- 

 ience is always objective as well as subjective — awareness of a 

 content or object as well as a subjective or conscious process; 

 and the facts of experience, which form the basis equally of 

 philoso])hy and science, have throughout this double character. 

 What philosophy demands is that they be taken in this concrete 

 character and not turned into objects with no subjective aspect, 

 as though they could be anything in or for experience at all 

 apart from our awareness of them. Any abstraction or con- 

 struction from them must be so regarded as not to imply that 

 the things so reached are of a nature entirely different from the 

 data themselves. In other words, they must be actual or possible 

 contents of experience, continuous in their existence and nature 

 with the sense-perceptions which they are invoked to explain. 



The need of explanation, i.e., of connexion or correlation. 



11 



Our Knowledge of the E.vternal World, p. loi. 

 P. 8i. Cf. Pearson, op. cit., pp. 53-4, 66-7. 



