172 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
inferences ’ are only made possible by the occurrence of mental processes 
which are also experienced, though not among the crude sensory data with 
which physical science is primarily concerned. ‘Thus all the sciences of 
Nature begin in sensory experience. ‘They abandon this experience for 
conceptual construction. But they return once more to experience to 
verify their constructive work. For it is not only the function of science 
to theorise. If it did this alone, it might end in crazy hypotheses and wild 
speculation. Its function is also to predict and control. And only in 
the immediacy of experience can the accuracy of the predictions be tested, 
or the competence of the controls be established. 
EMPIRICISM. 
I take it that an empirical science is either one which, as the term 
implies, is supported by the evidence of the senses, or one which is built 
up out of the elements of experience. Physical science, beginning and 
ending in sensory phenomena, is an example of the first kind ; psychology 
an example of the second. But the ordinary use of the term ‘ empirical ’ 
limits experience to that of a sensory nature. My plea is that this limita- 
tion is an arbitrary one and due to a philosophical prejudice. There is 
more in experience than sensory elements. Apart from the self and its 
states, affective and volitional, to which allusion has already been made, 
there are thought-things as well as sensed-things, relations as well a: 
elements, correlates as well as original fundaments, in experience. The 
universe of physical science, for example, consists of thought-things ; 
it is a conceptual universe erected on the foundations of a sensed one. 
The external world, as presented to us by contemporary science, possesses 
none of the glamour and richness with which it is clothed in sensory 
experience. It has no colour, nor sound, nor odour, nor warmth, nor 
extension, nor shape, nor material substance. Yet the physicists would 
tell us that they are dealing with ‘ reality’; and that ‘ reality ’ in itself is 
not what we naively suppose it to be. The world that has successively 
been conceived as a world of extended and solid objects, a world of atoms, 
of electrons and protons, of wave motions, is more physically ‘ real ’ for 
physics than the everyday world in which we consciously live. It must 
be so, for indeed it is looked upon as the cause of our conscious world. 
A secular controversy, not yet concluded, has been waged as to which of 
these worlds is the more ‘ real’ ; for the setting of them over against each 
other is at once as modern as mathematical physics and as ancient as 
Greek philosophy. In calling attention, however, to the distinction, it 
is not with a view to appraising their relative degrees of ‘ reality.’ It is 
in order to point out that both thought-things and sensed-things do in 
fact occur in our experience taken as a whole. A perfect mathematical 
plane triangle when an object of thought, although created by us as the 
result of a purely mental process, and never encountered in any sensory 
fashion whatever, is an experience just as much as a seen or felt (and 
mathematically imperfect) triangle cut out of wood or paper is. Each is 
referred to ‘ some thing’; but both are experiences, whereas the ‘ some 
things ’ are not. 
