SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM 353 



compelled to think it as such. A law, then, in the strict scientific 

 sense, is a fully established statement of universal and necessary 

 connexion." 1 As a simple matter of fact, no chemist, astronomer, 

 zoologist, botanist, or medical man, for example, ever does, under 

 his ordinary conditions of thought, conceive elements, worlds, 

 animals, plants, or human beings, as groups of his private feelings. 

 They are to him concrete realities existing external to himself, 

 and a principal part of his labours is to gather information from 

 and impart it to other concrete people. It is just this fact that 

 science, in more senses than one, is " organized common sense " 

 that imparts to it its intellectual richness and splendour, that 

 rescues it from the intellectual leanness, meanness and barrenness 

 of the grocer's catalogue. 



592. Nevertheless, though idealism is possible only to the man 

 who has learned to think in terms of common sense, though it is 

 utterly unable to advance beyond the fact that his feelings exist, 

 though the idealist philosopher can do nothing but wonder im- 

 potently, its position seems quite unassailable. That is, the 

 position of through-going idealism seems quite unassailable. That 

 kind of idealism which uses the whole paraphernalia of common 

 sense, which appeals to the phenomena that common sense has 

 compounded and so rendered coherent and to other minds, which 

 is idealist only during occasional asides when it proclaims itself 

 idealist, that kind is assailable at every joint. It is only a tour de 

 force by people who in their appeals to other people assume the 

 very thing they profess to deny. To sum up : my own attitude 

 I must be egotistical when I speak in terms of idealism is this ; 

 I admit I cannot pass beyond the circle of my feelings, which may 

 lie to me, or which, if they tell the truth, can tell it only in a 

 symbolic way. I do not positively know that there is a universe 

 external to my consciousness in which exist material objects and 

 minds like my own, which know or can know the things that I 

 know. But, having made that admission, I return wholly, or 

 almost wholly, to common sense, which has rescued, and still 

 rescues, me from mental impotence. I assume that the universe 

 exists as a reality, and that my feelings, and those of other people, 

 symbolize it much as written words symbolize spoken words. 

 I suppose that the real things of which the universe is constituted 

 have properties which bring them into relation with one another, 

 and that thence arise relations of cause and effect, and ultimately 

 my notions of necessary truth. I can test the evidence furnished 



1 Wei ton, Manual of Logic, vol. ii. p. 200. 

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