76 PSEUDO -SCIENTIFIC REALISM n 



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 

 colour, for example, exists apart from the mind 

 which conceives the idea of colour. They hold it 

 to be something which resides in the coloured 

 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 " colour " is not a mere name, which 

 was the extreme Nominalist position but a name 

 for that group of states of feeling which we call 

 blue, red, yellow, and so on, and which we beiieve 

 to be caused by luminiferous vibrations which 

 have not the slightest resemblance to colour ; 

 while these again are set afoot by states of the 

 body to which we ascribe colour, but which are 

 equally devoid of likeness to colour. 

 [ In the same way, a law of nature, in the scienti- 

 fic 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 colour has.J 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 towards one another. But the other 

 facts of observation, that bodies are not always 



