THE EXPLANATION OF LAWS 105 



question with no answer ; and I will therefore explain 

 how the matter appears to me, although I know that 

 many other people would give different answers. 



I should reply to the questioner by asking him what he 

 means by " real " and why he is so sure that a piece of 

 iron, or a dog, is a real object. And the answer that I 

 should suggest to him is that he calls these things real 

 because they are necessary to make the world intelligbile 

 to him ; and that it is because they are necessary to make 

 the world intelligible to him that he resents so strongly 

 (as he will if he is a plain man) the suggestions that some 

 philosophers have made that these things are not real. 

 It is true that these suggestions are often not interpreted 

 rightly, and that what the philosophers propose is not 

 so absurd as appears at first sight ; but the fact remains 

 that these ideas are of supreme importance to him in 

 making the world intelligible, and that he dislikes the 

 notion that they are in any sense less valuable than other 

 ideas which, for him at least, do not make the world so 

 intelligible. The invariable associations which are 

 implied by the use of the ideas " iron " and " dog " are 

 extremely important in all his practical life ; it is 

 extremely important for him that a certain hardness and 

 strength and density and so on are invariably associated 

 in the manner which we assert when we say that there is 

 iron, and that a certain form and sound and behaviour 

 are invariably associated in the way that we assert when 

 we say that there are dogs. When the plain man says 

 iron and dogs are real objects he means (I suggest) to 

 assert that there are such ' invariable associations, that 

 they are extremely important, and that they are rendered 

 intelligible only by the assertion that there is iron and 

 there are dogs. 



If we accept this view it is clear that we must answer 



in_tjie affirmative the question from which we started. 



fTheories are also designed to make the world intelligible 



