August i8, 1904] 



NA TURE 



371 



qualities on our organs of sense-perception ; and here, no 

 doubt, common sense and theory parted company. 



Vou need not fear that I am going to drag you into the 

 controversies with which this theory is historically con- 

 nected. They have left abiding traces on more than one 

 system of philosophy. They are not yet solved. In the 

 course of them the very possibility of an independent physical 

 universe has seemed to melt away under the solvent powers 

 of critical analysis. But with all this I am not now con- 

 cerned. I do not propose to ask what proof we have that 

 an external world exists, or how, if it does exist, we are 

 able to obtain cognisance of it. These may be questions 

 very proper to be asked by philosophy ; but they are not 

 proper questions to be asked by science. For, logically, 

 they are antecedent to science, and we must reject the 

 sceptical answers to both of them before physical science 

 becomes possible at all. My present purpose requires me 

 to do no more than observe that, be this theory of the 

 primary and secondary qualities of matter good or bad, it 

 is the one on which science has in the main proceeded. It 

 was with matter thus conceived that Newton experimented. 

 To it he applied his laws of motion ; of it he predicated 

 universal gravitation. Nor was the case greatly altered 

 when science became as much preoccupied with the move- 

 ments of molecules as it was with those of planets. For 

 molecules and atoms, whatever else might be said of them, 

 were at least pieces of matter, and, like other pieces of 

 matter, possessed those " primary " qualities supposed to be 

 characteristic of all matter, whether found in large masses 

 or in small. 



But the electric theory which we have been considering 

 carries us into a new region altogether. It does not confine 

 itself to accounting for the secondary qualities by the 

 primary, or the behaviour of matter in bulk by the behaviour 

 of matter in atoms ; it analyses matter, whether molar or 

 molecular, into something which is not matter at all. The 

 atom is now no more than the relatively vast theatre of 

 operations in whicii minute monads perform their orderly 

 evolutions ; while the monads themselves are not regarded 

 as units of matter, but as units of electricity ; so that matter 

 is not merely explained, but is explained away. 



Now the point to which I desire to direct attention is not 

 to be sought in the great divergence between matter as 

 thus conceived by the physicist and matter as the ordinary 

 man supposes himself to know it, between matter as it is 

 perceived and matter as it really is, but to the fact that the 

 first of these two quite inconsistent views is wholly based 

 on the second. 



This is surely something of a paradox. We claim to 

 found all our scientific opinions on experience ; and the ex- 

 perience on which we found our theories of the physical 

 universe is our sense-perception of that universe. That is 

 experience ; and in this region of belief there is no other. 

 Yet the conclusions which thus profess to be entirely founded 

 upon experience are to all appearance fundamentally opposed 

 to it ; our knowledge of reality is based upon illusion, and 

 the very conceptions we use in describing it to others, or in 

 thinking of it ourselves, are abstracted from anthropo- 

 morphic fancies, which science forbids us to believe and 

 Nature compels us to employ. 



We here touch the fringe of a series of problems with 

 which inductive logic ought to deal, but which that most 

 unsatisfactory branch of philosophy has systematically 

 ignored. Ihis is no fault of men of science. They are 

 occupied in the task of making discoveries, not in that of 

 an.ilysing the fundamental presuppositions which the very 

 possibility of making discoveries implies. Neither is it the 

 f.'iult of transcendental metaphysicians. Their speculations 

 flourish on a different level of thought ; their interest in a 

 philosophy of nature is lukewarm ; and howsoever the 

 questions in which they are chiefly concerned be answered, 

 it is by no means certain that the answers will leave the 

 humbler difficulties at which I have hinted either nearer 

 to or further from a solution. But though men of science 

 and iUealists stand acquitted, the same can hardly be said 

 ot empirical philosophers. So far from solving the problem, 

 they seem scarcely to have understood that there was a 

 problem to be solved. Led astray by a misconception to 

 which I have already referred ; believing that science was 

 concerned only with (so-called) " phenomena," that it had 

 done all that it could be asked to do if it accounted for the 



NO. 18 1 6, VOL. 70] 



sequence of our individual sensations, that it was concerned 

 only with the " laws of Nature," and not with the inner 

 character of physical reality ; disbelieving, indeed, that any 

 such physical reality does in truth exist ; — it has never felt 

 called upon seriously to consider what are the actual methods 

 by which science attains its results, and how those methods 

 are to be justified. If anyone, for example, will take up 

 Mill's logic, with its " sequences and co-existences between 

 phenomena," its "method of difference," its "method of 

 agreement," and the rest : if he will then compare the actual 

 doctrines of science with this version of the mode in which 

 those doctrines have been arrived at. — he will soon be con- 

 vinced of the exceedingly thin intellectual fare which has 

 been hitherto served out to us under the imposing t'itle of 

 Inductive Theory. 



There is an added emphasis given to these reflections by 

 a train of thought which has long interested me, though I 

 acknowledge that it never seems to have interested anyone 

 else. Observe, then, that in order of logic sense-percep- 

 tions supply the premisses from which we draw all our 

 knowledge of the physical world. It is they which tell us 

 there is a physical world ; it is on their authority that we 

 learn its character. But in order of causation they are 

 effects due (in part) to the constitution of our organs of 

 sense. What we see depends not inerely on what there is 

 to be seen, but on our eyes. What we hear depends not 

 merely on what there is to hear, but on our ears. Now, 

 eyes and ears, and all the mechanism of perception, have, as 

 we know, been evolved in us and our brute progenitors by 

 the slow operation of Natural Selection. And what is true 

 of sense-perception is of course also true of the intellectual 

 powers which enable us to erect upon the frail and narrow 

 platform which sense-perception provides, the proud fabric 

 of the sciences. 



Now Natural Selection only works through utility. It 

 encourages aptitudes useful to their possessor or his species 

 in the struggle for existence, and, for a similar reason, it 

 is apt to discourage useless aptitudes, however interesting 

 they may be from other points of view, because, being use- 

 less, they are probably burdensome. 



But it is certain that our powers of sense-perception and 

 of calculation were fully developed ages before they were 

 efTectively employed in searching out the secrets of physical 

 reality — for our discoveries in this field are the triumphs 

 hut of yesterday. The blind forces of Natural Selection, 

 which so admirably simulate design when they are pro- 

 viding for a present need, possess no power of prevision, 

 and could never, except by accident, have endowed man- 

 kind, while in the making, with a physiological or mental 

 outfit adapted to the higher physical investigations. So 

 far as natural science can teil us, every quality of sense or 

 intellect which does not help us to fight, to eat, and to bring 

 up children, is but a by-product of the qualities which do. 

 Our organs of sense-perception were not given us for pur- 

 poses of research ; nor was it to aid us in meting out the 

 heavens or dividing the atom that our powers of calculation 

 and analysis were evolved from the rudimentary instincts of 

 the animal. 



It is presumably due to these circumstances that the beliefs 

 of all mankind about the material surroundings in which 

 it dwells are not only imperfect but fundamentally wrong. 

 It may seem singular that down to, say, five years ago, 

 our race has, without exception, lived and died in a world 

 of illusions ; and that its illusions, or those with which we 

 are here alone concerned, have not been about things re- 

 mote or abstract, things transcendental or divine, but about 

 what men see and handle, about those " plain matters of 

 fact " among which common sense daily moves with its 

 most confident step and most self-satisfied smile. Pre- 

 sumably, however, this is either because too direct a vision 

 of physical reality was a hindrance, not a help, in the 

 strugs'le for existence ; because falsehood was more useful 

 than truth ; or else because with so imperfect a material as 

 living tissue no better results could be attained. But, if 

 this conclusion be accepted, its consequences extend to other 

 organs of knowledge besides those of perception. Not 

 merely the senses, but the intellect, must be judged by it ; 

 and it is hard to see why evolution, which has so lamentably 

 failed to produce trustworthy instruments for obtaining the 

 raw material of experience, should be credited with a larger 

 measure of success in its provision of the physiological 



