ii2 PSYCHO-PHYSICAL METHOD 



the universe will have been rendered completely in- 

 telligible.' 



This view, first clearly propounded in ancient times 

 by Democritus, flourished considerably in the middle 

 part of the last century. But few scientific men will 

 now subscribe to it. You will have noticed that Pro- 

 fessor Gotch claimed only that this great scheme of 

 things is that which scientific men have evolved in 

 aiming to render intelligible the phenomenal world by / 

 means of the principle of physical causation. In saying 

 that, he marked off, as falling within this scheme, one 

 great group of sciences, the sciences that deal with 

 the world of phenomena ; with the things that we appre- 

 hend by means of the senses, the things we see and 

 hear and touch and taste ; with the objective world, in 

 short. 



But it is obvious that there is known by each of us 

 another order of existence, a world of events not appre- 

 hended by means of the senses, a world not phenomenal 

 and not objective in character, but subjective, the world 

 of his own immediate experience, made up of his sensa- 

 tions and ideas, his pains and pleasures, his emotions 

 and his strivings, and all the ever-varying states of his 

 consciousness. 



That great scheme, by means of which the physicist 

 endeavours to render intelligible the phenomenal world, 

 is reached by inference from the changes of phenomena ^ 

 to underlying causes and conditions, the properties, the 

 motions and the collocations of matter and ether, the sum 

 of which is conceived as making up the whole physical 

 universe. Clearly, therefore, in that scheme there is no 

 place for these facts of immediate experience, these states 

 of our own consciousness. The universe we know 

 seems, then, to consist of two orders of things, two orders 



