THE AIM AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD. 43 



The rejection of some such view as this seems to entail the 

 ^adoption of one which makes an almost complete divorce 

 between the conceptual and perceptual worlds. It must, in 

 effect, be held that man was in the beginning thrown naked 

 and helpless into an unintelligible and intractable world which 

 as yet he had no means of reducing to his will : 



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So it was until at length Prometheus (disguised, perhaps, as 

 Natural Selection) brought relief in the shape of the gift of 

 a set of concepts linked each to all in the bonds of apodeictic 

 certainty, and having the curious property that by the mere 

 consideration of the relations of these concepts man could 

 master, at least as far as his practical n^eds required, much of 

 "the bewildering flux of the perceptual world. 



In a well known article,* Mr. Bussell has, in 'effect, 

 shewn that the denial of absolute space is equivalent to the 

 acceptance of views of which the above is at most an' 

 exaggerated statement. In the relational theory conceptual 

 space consists solely of the concepts of the relational nexus in 

 which 1 the "things" of perception are imbedded. The 

 "points" which are thought of as the terms of these relations 

 are only symbols of the things themselves. For this reason 

 (possibly) Mr. Eussell calls them "material points." He 

 proceeds to point out that " in order to give an ac.cou.nt, which 

 will consist with the facts, of the intersection of figures,~the 

 order of lines and planes, and the nature of areas and volume," 

 we must be prepared to assert either that " material points " 

 are as a matter of empirical fact distributed just as spatial 



* "Is Position in Space and Time Absolute or Relative?" Mind, 

 N.S., No. 39. 



