SCIENCE AND THE UNOBSERVABLE — DINGLE 225 



everyday intercourse and in most scientific discussions also. We 

 regard scientific research as an exploration of this independent uni- 

 verse, an attempt to discover what it contains and to understand the 

 preestablished relation of one part with another. It is this concep- 

 tion of science or philosophy that makes possible the dilemma by 

 which we are faced. If the universe exists independently of our 

 experience of it, then clearly it is presumption on our part to deny 

 that it can contain anything inaccessible to experience. And, on the 

 other hand, if we abstain from this presumption we make all inquiry 

 a mockery, for we have no guarantee that anything that we may dis- 

 cover is more than a triviality, an insignificant part of a universe 

 whose essential elements are eternally unknowable. We may, it is 

 true, make a verbal escape from the dilemma by saying that, although 

 the universe may be mainly unknowable, we proceed by an act of 

 faith that we are given faculties capable of apprehending it completely ; 

 but such an act of faith is both logically and practically indistinguish- 

 able from the assumption of omniscience — it is simply arrogance 

 wearing the cloak of humility. 



But suppose we take the idealistic view, regarding our experience, 

 our observations, as the primary data, and the universe as a mental 

 construct formed to give rational coherence to those observations. 

 The whole matter then appears in a different light, in which the 

 dilemma is no longer seen. The statement that nothing which is 

 logically or physically unobservable is significant is simply a state- 

 ment of our aim as scientists or philosophers ; it means that we confine 

 ourselves to our purpose of deducing a universe from our observa- 

 tions and do not allow our fancies to intervene. There is no assump- 

 tion of omniscience because there is no independent universe to know, 

 and the arrogance disappears because we make no claim to know all 

 the possibilities of observation. We set no limit to the possibilities 

 of experience; we simply refuse to assert anything for which we have 

 no (direct or indirect) justification in experience, and as observation 

 grows the universe grows also. The objection to the principle, there- 

 fore, vanishes completely, from the idealistic point of view. 



On the other hand, the objection to denying the principle by no 

 means vanishes. If we do not exclude the physically unobservable 

 from our description of the universe, we still have no grounds for not 

 admitting the binkum and so reducing philosophy to a farce. When 

 M. Maritain claims that a thing is independent of our observation 

 of it, he immediately makes it impossible for us to know that we are 

 saying anything of the least importance about it, no matter whether 

 we adopt the realistic or the idealistic viewpoint. If we are realists, 

 the thing may be essentially beyond apprehension; and, if we are 

 idealists, we may form it equally legitimately from observation or 

 from fancy. 



The position, then, is this. If we take the realistic view, we are left 



