BY BERTRAND RUSSELL 



Human Knowledge 



Demy 8vo. Third Impression 305. net 



This book is intended for the general reader, not for professional 

 philosophers. It begins with a brief survey of what science professes 

 to know about the universe. In this survey the attempt is to be as far 

 as possible impartial and impersonal; the aim is to come as near as our 

 capacities permit to describing the world as it might appear to an 

 observer of miraculous perceptive powers viewing it from without. In 

 science, we are concerned with what we know rather than what we know. 

 We attempt to use an order in our description which ignores, for the 

 moment, the fact that we are part of the universe, and that any account 

 which we can give of it depends upon its effects upon ourselves, and is to 

 this extent inevitably anthropocentric. 



Bertrand Russell accordingly begins with the system of galaxies, and 

 passes on, by stages, to our own galaxy, our own little solar system, our 

 own tiny planet, the infinitesimal specks of life upon its surface, and 

 finally as the climax of insignificance, the bodies and minds of those odd 

 beings that imagine themselves the lords of creation and the end of the 

 whole vast cosmos. 



But this survey, which seems to end in the pettiness of Man and all 

 his concerns, is only one side of the truth. There is another side, which 

 must be brought out by a survey of a different kind. In this second kind 

 of survey, the question is no longer what the universe is, but how we 

 come to know whatever we do know about it. In this survey Man again 

 occupies the centre, as in the Ptolemaic astronomy. What we know of 

 the world we know by means of events in our own lives, events which, 

 but for the power of thought, would remain merely private. 



The book inquires what are our data, and what are the principles by 

 means of which we make our inferences. The data from which these 

 inferences proceed are private to ourselves; what we call "seeing the 

 sun" is an event in the life of the seer, from which the astronomer's sun 

 has to be inferred by a long and elaborate process, It is evident that, if 

 the world were a higgledy-piggledy chaos, inferences of this kind would 

 be impossible; but for casual inter-connectedness, what happens in one 

 place would afford no indication of what has happened in another. It 

 is the process from private sensation and thought to impersonal science 

 that forms the chief topic of the book. The road is at times difficult, 

 but until we have traversed it neither the scope nor the limitations of 

 human knowledge can be adequately understood 



