SHORT PAPERS 



A short paper was contributed to the work of the Section by Professor W. P. 

 Montague of Columbia University, on the " Physical Reality of Secondary Quali- 

 ties." The speaker said that from the beginning of modern philosophy there has 

 existed a strong tendency among all schools of thought monists of the idealistic 

 or materialistic types, as well as outspoken dualists to treat the distinction 

 between primary and secondary qualities as coincident, so far as it goes, with 

 the distinction between physical and psychical. Colors, sounds, odors, etc., are 

 regarded as purely subjective or mental in their nature, and as having no true 

 membership in the physical order; while correlatively all special forms and 

 relations have been in their turn extruded from the field of the psychical. Let it 

 be noted that introspection offers little or nothing in support of this view. There 

 is nothing, for example, about the color red that would make it appear more dis- 

 tinctively psychical or subjective than a figure or a motion. The perception of 

 a square or a triangle is not a square or triangular perception; but neither is the 

 perception of red or blue a red or blue perception. Now with the affective or 

 emotional contents of experience the case is quite different. 



A feeling of pain is a painful feeling, a consciousness of anger is an angry con- 

 sciousness. Pains are more and less painful, according as we are more and less 

 aware of them. With feelings and volitions esse is indeed percipi. Colors and 

 other secondary qualities, however, do not seem thus to increase or diminish 

 in their reality concomitantly with our perceptions of them. Red is red, neither 

 more nor less, regardless of the amount to which we attend to it. And yet it 

 remains true that, notwithstanding this seeming objectivity, the secondary qual- 

 ities have long been contrasted with the primary, and classed along with the 

 affective and volitional states as purely subjective facte. It has always seemed 

 curious that a view so important as this in its consequences, and so radically at 

 variance, not only with Pre-Cartesian philosophy, but also with our instinctive 

 beliefs, should have won its way to the position of an accepted dogma; and the 

 purpose of this paper was first to examine the grounds upon which this belief 

 rests, and second to show that the problem of the independent reality of the 

 physical world and the problem of the relation of physical and psychical appear 

 in a clearer and more hopeful light when disentangled from the quite different 

 problem of the relation of primary and secondary qualities. 



There were two reasons why the older or Pre-Cartesian view of this question 

 should give place to the modern doctrine. First, because of the rediscovery of 

 the idea of mechanism, without which predictive science had been virtually im- 

 possible. The second reason for reducing the secondary qualities to a merely 

 subjective status lay in the fact that they are much more dependent than the 

 primary qualities upon the bodily organism of the one who perceives them. 

 In closing Professor Montague said: 



" I wish in closing to point out two consequences of the view which I have 

 been opposing. First, the present paradoxical status of the eternal world; second, 

 the equally paradoxical status of the relation of that world to the world of mind. 

 Berkeley was the first thinker clearly to perceive the unsubstantial nature of a 

 world made up solely of primary qualities. Indeed, in the last analysis, a world 

 of primary qualities, and nothing else, is a world of relations without terms, a 

 geometrical fiction, the objective (or, for that matter, the subjective) existence 



