I

NOTHING would seem easier, at first sight, than to give a general description of the ordinary beliefs of ordinary people about our familiar world of things and persons. It is the world in which we live; it is for all men a real world; it is for many men the real world; it is the world of common sense, the world where the plain man feels at home, and where the practical man seeks refuge from the vain subtleties of metaphysics. Our stock of beliefs about it may perhaps be difficult to justify, but it seems strange that they should be difficult to describe; yet difficult, I think, they are.

Some statements about it may, however, be made with confidence. It is in space and time; i.e. the material things of which it is composed, including living bodies, are extended, have mutual position, and possess at least some measure of duration.

Things are not changed by a mere change of place, but a change of place relative to an observer always changes their appearance for him. Common sense is, therefore, compelled in this, as in countless other cases, to distinguish the appearance of a thing from its reality; and to hold, as an essential article of its working creed, that appearances may alter, leaving realities unchanged.

Common sense does not, however, draw the inference that our experience of material things is other than direct and immediate. It has never held the opinion—or, if you will, the heresy—that what we perceive (at least by sight and touch) are states of our own mind, which somehow copy or represent external things. Neither has it ever held that the character or duration of external things in any way depends upon our observations of them. In perception there is no reaction by the perceiving mind on the object perceived. Things in their true reality are not affected by mere observation, still less are they constituted by it. When material objects are in question, common sense never supposes that esse and percipi are identical.

But then, what, according to common sense, are things in their true reality? What are they ‘in themselves,’ when no one is looking at them, or when only some of their aspects are under observation?

We can, at all events, say what (according to common sense) things are not. They are more than collections of aspects. If we could simultaneously perceive a ‘thing’ at a thousand different distances, at a thousand different angles, under a thousand varieties of illumination, with its interior ideally exposed in a thousand different sections, common sense, if pressed, would, I suppose, still hold that these were no more than specimens of the endless variety of ways in which things may appear, without either changing their nature or fully revealing what that nature is. But though common sense might give this answer, it would certainly resent the question being put. It finds no difficulty in carrying on its work without starting these disturbing inquiries. It is content to say that, though a thing is doubtless always more than the sum of those aspects of it to which we happen to be attending, yet our knowledge that it is and what it is, however imperfect, is, for practical purposes, sufficiently clear and trustworthy, requiring the support neither of metaphysics nor psychology.—This, with all its difficulties, is, I believe, an account, true as far as it goes, of the world of things as common sense conceives it. This is the sort of world which science sets out to explain. Let me give an illustration.

We perceive some object—let us say the sun. We perceive it directly and not symbolically. What we see is not a mental image of the sun, nor a complex of sensations caused by the sun; but the sun itself. Moreover, this material external object retains its identity while it varies in appearance. It is red in the morning; it is white at midday; it is red once more in the evening; it may be obscured by clouds or hidden in eclipse; it vanishes and reappears once in every twenty-four hours; yet, amid all these changes and vanishings, its identity is unquestioned. Though we perceive it differently at different times, and though there are times when we do not perceive it at all, we know it to be the same; nor do we for a moment believe (with Heraclitus) that when it is lost to view it has, on that account, either altered its character or ceased to exist.

In the main, therefore, experience is, according to common sense, a very simple affair. We see something, or we feel something, or, like Dr. Johnson, we kick something, and ‘there's an end on't.’ Experience is the source of all knowledge, and therefore of all explanation; but, in itself, it seems scarcely to require to be explained. Common sense is prepared to leave it where it finds it. No doubt the occurrence of optical or other illusions may disturb this mood of intellectual tranquillity. Common sense, when it has to consider the case of appearances, some of which are held, on extraneous grounds, to be real and others to be illusory, may feel that there are, after all, problems raised by perception—by the direct experience of things—which are not without their difficulties. But the case of illusions is exceptional, and rarely disturbs the even tenor of our daily round.

II

Now science, as it gladly acknowledges, is but an extension of common sense. It accepts, among other matters, the common-sense view of perception. Like common sense, it distinguishes the thing as it is from the thing as it appears. Like common sense, it regards the things which are experienced as being themselves unaffected by experience. But, unlike common sense, it devotes great attention to the way in which experience is produced by things. Its business is with the causal series. This, to be sure, is a subject which common sense does not wholly ignore. It would acknowledge that we perceive a lamp through the light which it sheds, and recognise a trumpet through the sound which it emits; but the nature of light or sound, and the manner in which they produce our experience of bright or sonorous objects, it hands over to science for further investigation.

And the task is cheerfully undertaken. Science also deems perception to be the source of all our knowledge of external nature. But it regards it as something more, and different. For perception is itself a part of nature, a natural process, the product of antecedent causes, the cause of subsequent effects. It requires, therefore, like other natural facts, to be observed and explained; and it is the business of science to explain it.

Thus we are brought face to face with the contrast on which so much of the argument of these lectures turns: the contrast between beliefs considered as members of a cognitive series, and beliefs considered as members of a causal series. In the cognitive series, beliefs of perception are at the root of our whole knowledge of natural laws. In the causal series, they are the effects of natural laws in actual operation. This is so important an example of this dual state that you must permit me to consider it in some detail.

We may examine what goes on between the perceiving person and the thing he perceives from either end; but it is by no means a matter of indifference with which end we begin. If we examine the relation of the perceiver to the perceived it does not seem convenient or accurate to describe that relation as a process. It is an experience, immediate and intuitive; not indeed infallible, but direct and self-sufficient. If I look at the sun, it is the sun I see, and not an image of the sun, nor a sensation which suggests the sun, or symbolises the sun. Still less do I see ethereal vibrations, or a retinal image, or a nervous reaction, or a cerebral disturbance. For, in the act of perceiving, no intermediate entities are themselves perceived.

But now if we, as it were, turn round, and, beginning at the other end, consider the relation of the perceived to the perceiver, no similar statements can be made. We find ourselves concerned, not with an act of intuition, but with a physical process, which is complicated, which occupies time, which involves many stages. We have left behind cognition; we are plunged in causation. Experience is no longer the immediate apprehension of fact; it is the transmission of a message conveyed from the object to the percipient by relays of material messengers. As to how the transmission is effected explanations vary with the growth of science. They have been entirely altered more than once since the modern era began, and with each alteration they become more complicated. They depend, not on one branch of science only, but on many. Newtonian astronomy, solar physics, the theory of radiation, the optical properties of the atmosphere, the physiology of vision, the psychology of perception, and I daresay many other branches of research, have to be drawn upon: and all this to tell us what it is we see, and how it is we come to see it.

III

Now there is no one who possesses the least smattering of philosophy who does not know that the views I have just endeavoured to describe are saturated with difficulties: difficulties connected with the nature of perception; difficulties connected with the nature of the object as perceived; difficulties connected with its unperceived physical basis; difficulties connected with the relation in which these three stand to each other. For common sense the material object consists of a certain number of qualities and aspects which are perceived, an inexhaustible number which might be perceived, but are not, and (perhaps) a vaguely conceived ‘somewhat’ lying behind both. The medieval Aristotelian, if I rightly understand him (which very likely I do not), developed this ‘somewhat’ into the notion of substance—an entity somewhat loosely connected with the qualities which it supported, and in no way explaining them. There was ‘substance’ in a piece of gold, and ‘substance’ in a piece of lead; but there was nothing unreasonable in the endeavour to associate the qualities of gold with the substance of lead, and thus for all practical purposes to turn lead into gold.

Modern science teaches a very different lesson. It has, perhaps, not wholly abandoned the notion of material substance, if this be defined as the un-perceivable support of perceivable qualities; but it persistently strives to connect the characteristics of matter with its structure, and, among other characteristics, that of producing, or helping to produce, in us those immediate perceptions which we describe as our experience of matter itself.

An important stage in this endeavour was marked by the famous distinction between the primary and the secondary qualities of matter: the primary qualities being the attributes of external material things which were deemed to be independent of the observer (for example, impenetrability, density, weight, configuration); the secondary qualities being those which, apart from observers endowed with senses like our own, would either exist differently, or would not exist at all (for example, colour and taste). On this view the primary qualities were among the causes of the secondary qualities, and the secondary qualities were transferred from the thing perceived to the person perceiving.

I am not the least concerned to defend this theory. It has been much derided, and is certainly open to attack. But something like it seems to be an inevitable stage in the development of modern views of nature. The whole effort of physical science is to discover the material or non-psychical facts which shall, among other things, account for our psychical experiences. It is true that there are men of science, as well as philosophers, who regard all such constructions as purely arbitrary—mere labour-saving devices which have nothing to do with reality. But though I shall have something to say about these theories in my next course of lectures, for the present I need only observe that they do not represent ordinary scientific opinion, either as it is, or as it has ever been. Science thinks, rightly or wrongly, that she is concerned with a real world, which persists independently of our experience: she has never assented to the doctrine that the object of her patient investigations is no more than a well-contrived invention for enabling us to foretell, and perhaps to modify, the course of our personal feelings.

But then, if science is right, we are committed to a division between the contents of immediate experience and its causes, which showed itself dimly and tentatively in the distinction between the secondary and the primary qualities of matter, but has become deeper and more impassable with every advance in physics and physiology. It was possible to maintain (though, I admit, not very easy) that, while the secondary qualities of matter are due to the action of the primary qualities on our organs of perception, the primary qualities themselves are, nevertheless, the objects of direct experience. The fact, for example, that colour is no more than a sensation need not preclude us from perceiving the material qualities which, like shape, or motion, or mass, are the external and independent causes to which the sensation is due. I do not say that this view was ever explicitly entertained—nor does it signify. For, if we accept the teaching of science, it can, I suppose, be entertained no more. The physical causes of perception are inferred, but not perceived. The real material world has been driven by the growth of knowledge further and further into the realm of the unseen, and now lies completely hidden from direct experience behind the impenetrable screen of its own effects.

IV

For consider what the causal process of perception really is if we trace it from the observed to the observer—if we follow the main strands in the complex lines of communication through which the object seen reveals itself to the man who sees it.

I revert to my previous example—the sun. We need not consider those of its attributes which are notoriously arrived at by indirect methods—which are not perceived but inferred—its magnitude, for example, or its mass. Confining ourselves to what is directly perceived, its angular size, its shape (projected on a plane), its warmth, its brightness, its colour, its (relative) motion, its separation from the observer in space—how are these immediate experiences produced?

The answers have varied with the progress of science; nor, for my present purpose, does it greatly matter which answers we adopt. Let us take those which are commonly accepted at the present moment. They are not only the truest, but the fullest; and for that very reason they put the difficulty with which we are concerned in the highest relief. We begin our causal series with electrons, or, if you do not accept the electric theory of matter in any of its forms, then with atoms and molecules. We start with these, because the sun is a collection of them, and because it is their movements which set going the whole train of causes and effects by which the sun produces in us the perception of itself.

We may take, as the next stage, ethereal vibrations, of various lengths and various amplitudes, sent travelling into space by the moving particles. A fraction of these waves reaches our atmosphere, and of that fraction a fraction reaches our eyes, and of that fraction a further fraction falls within the narrow limits of length to which our eyes are sensitive. It is through these that we are able to see the sun. Still another fraction, not necessarily identical in wave-lengths, affects the nerves which produce in us the sensation of warmth. It is through these that we are able to feel the sun.

But, before we either see or feel, there is much still to be accomplished. The causal series is not nearly completed. Complicated neural processes, as yet only imperfectly understood; complicated cerebral processes—as yet understood still less—both involving physiological changes far more complicated than the electrical ‘accelerations’ or electro-magnetic disturbances with which we have hitherto been dealing, bring us to the end of the material sequence of causes and effects, and lay the message from the object perceived on the threshold of the perceiving consciousness. So does a postman slip into your letter-box a message which has been first written, then carried by hand, then by a mail-cart, then by a train, then by hand again, till it reaches its destination, and nothing further is required except that what has been written should be read and understood.

Thus far the material process of transmission. The psychical process has still to come. Psychology is a science, not less than physiology or physics; and psychology has much to say on the subject of perception. It is true that scientific explorers whose point of departure is introspective; who concern themselves primarily with ideas, conceptions, sensations, and so forth, rarely succeed in fitting their conclusions without a break to those of their colleagues who begin with the ‘external’ causes of perception. The two tunnels, driven from opposite sides of the mountain, do not always meet under its crest. Still, we cannot on that account ignore the teaching of psychology on the genesis of perceptual experience regarded, not as the ground of knowledge, but as a natural product.

I do not mean to attempt a summary of psychology from this point of view, any more than I have attempted a summary of physics or physiology. My argument is really independent, in this case as in the other, of particular systems. All I ask for is the admission that in perception there are conditions antecedently supplied by the perceiving consciousness which profoundly modify every perceptual experience—and that these conditions (unlike Kant's forms) are natural growths, varying, like other natural growths, from individual to individual. This admission must, I think, be made by every empirical psychologist, to whatever school he happens to belong.

If this statement seems obscure in its general and abstract form, consider a particular application of it. Let us assume, with many psychologists, that Will, in the form of selective attention, lies at the root of our perceptual activities; that we may therefore be said, in a sense, voluntarily to create the objects we perceive; that experience of the present is largely qualified by memories of the past, and that the perceptual mould into which our sensations are run is largely a social product—born of the intercourse between human beings, and, in its turn, rendering that intercourse possible. Is it not clear that, on assumptions like these, consciousness, so far from passively receiving the messages conveyed to it through physical and physiological channels, actively modifies their character?

V

But why, it may be asked, should these considerations involve any difficulty? And, if there be a difficulty, what is its exact character?

In its most general form the difficulty is this. It is claimed by science that its conclusions are based upon experience. The experience spoken of is unquestionably the familiar perception of external things and their movements as understood by common sense; and, however much our powers of perception be increased by telescopes, microscopes, balances, thermometers, electroscopes, and so forth, this common-sense view suffers no alteration. The perceptions of a man of science are, in essence, the perceptions of ordinary men in their ordinary moments, beset with the same difficulties, accepted with the same assurance. Whatever be the proper way of describing scientific results, the experimental data on which they rest are sought and obtained in the spirit of ‘naïf realism.’

On this foundation science proceeds to build up a theory of nature by which the foundation itself is shattered. It saws off the branch on which it is supported. It kicks down the ladder by which it has climbed. It dissolves the thing perceived into a remote reality which is neither perceived nor perceivable. It turns the world of common sense into an illusion, and on this illusion it calmly rests its case.

But this is not the only logical embarrassment in which we are involved. When science has supplied us with a description of external things as they ‘really are,’ and we proceed to ask how the physical reality reveals itself to us in experience, a new difficulty arises, or, if you like, the old difficulty with a new face. For science requires us to admit that experience, from this point of view, is equivalent to perception; and that perception is a remote psychological effect of a long train of causes, physical and physiological, originally set in motion by the external thing, but in no way resembling it. Look carefully at this process from the outside, and ask yourselves why there should be any such correspondence between the first of these causes and the last of these effects, as should enable us to know or infer the one from the other? Why should the long train of unperceivable intermediaries that connect the perceived with the perceiver be trusted to speak the truth?

I just now likened these intermediaries to relays of messengers. But messengers are expected to hand on their message in the form in which they have received it. The messengers change, but not the message. The metaphor, therefore, is far too complimentary to the train of physical causes which reveal the material thing to the perceiving consciousness. The neural changes which are in immediate causal contiguity with that psychical effect which we call ‘the experience of an external object’ have no resemblance whatever either to the thing as it is perceived or to the thing as it really is. Nor have they any resemblance to the proximate cause which sets them going, namely, the ethereal vibrations; nor have these to the accelerated electrons which constitute the incandescent object which we ‘experience’ as the sun. Nor has the sun, as experienced, the slightest resemblance to the sun as it really is.

Hume, in his ‘Dialogues on Natural Religion,’ urges the absurdity of arguing from an effect like the universe to a cause like God, since the argument from a particular effect to a particular cause, or from a particular cause to a particular effect, is only legitimate when we have had some previous experience of that particular class of causal sequence; and nobody, it is plain, has had the opportunity of observing Creation. Whatever be the value of this argument in the case of God and the world, it seems to me conclusive in the case of matter and man. We cannot argue from purely psychical effects, like perceptions and sensations, to external causes, like physiological processes or ethereal vibrations, unless we can experience both sets of facts in causal relation. And this, if we accept the conclusions of science, we can never do—partly because the intermediate members of the causal series are unperceivable; partly because, if they were perceivable, perception has been reduced by science to a purely psychical effect—which obviously cannot include its material cause. This last must for ever remain outside the closed circle of sensible experiences.

Here, of course, we find ourselves face to face with a familiar objection to those philosophies of perception which deny that we have any access to external reality, except through ideas which are its copy. But they are in a better case than science. They need not explicitly admit a discrepancy between their premises and their conclusions. They arrive at the subjectivity of perception by methods of introspection. They interrogate consciousness, and are convinced that every experience can be analysed into sensations and ideas, some of which, no doubt, suggest externality, but none of which are external. If, then, the worst comes to the worst, they can, and often do, lighten their philosophic ship by pitching the whole material universe overboard as a bit of superfluous cargo. But physical science cannot (at least in my opinion) do anything of the kind. Its whole business is with the material universe. Its premises are experiences of external things, not of internal sensation and ideas. And if it has associated its fortunes with a theory of perception which treats experience as a natural effect of the thing experienced; if it has thereby wandered within sight of the perilous problems which haunt the frontier where mind and matter meet, it has not done so in a spirit of reckless adventure, but in the legitimate pursuit of its own affairs.

This does not necessarily make things easier. We are not here concerned with questionings about the remoter provinces of knowledge—provinces unexplored except by specialists, negligible by ordinary men engaged on ordinary business. On the contrary, the difficulties to which I have called your attention threaten the unquestioned assumption of daily life, the presupposition of every scientific experiment, and the meaning of every scientific generalisation. They cannot be ignored.

On the other hand, threaten as they may, these difficulties can never modify our attitude either towards practical action or scientific theory. Beliefs which were inevitable before remain inevitable still. The supreme act of instinctive faith involved in the perception of external objects stands quite unshaken. Whatever we may think of Berkeley, we cannot give up Dr. Johnson. ‘Seeing,’ says the proverb, ‘is believing’; and it speaks better than it knows.

VI

Can we, then, adopt a middle course, and, imitating the serene acquiescence of Hume, accept the position of sceptics in the study and believers in the market-place? This seems eminently unsatisfactory; and, since believers on this subject we must perforce remain, it behoves us to consider how, and on what terms, we can best qualify our scepticism.

Observe, then, that the particular difficulty which has been occupying our attention arises in the main from the assumption that our common-sense beliefs in the reality and character of material things have no other foundation than the fact that we so perceive them. From such premises it was impossible, it seemed, to infer that they exist otherwise than as they are perceived; and still more impossible to regard the immediate intuition by which we apprehend the object, and the long-drawn sequence of causes by which the object is revealed, as being the same process looked at from different ends.

But this difficulty is greatly mitigated if we hold that our belief in an independent world of material objects, however it may be caused, is neither a conclusion drawn from this or that particular experience nor from all our experiences put together, but an irresistible assumption. Grant the existence of external things, and it becomes possible and legitimate to attempt explanations of their appearance, to regard our perceptions of them as a psychical and physiological product of material realities which do not themselves appear and cannot be perceived. Refuse, on the other hand, to grant this assumption, and no inductive legerdemain will enable us to erect our scientific theories about an enduring world of material things upon the frail foundation of successive personal perceptions.

If this does not seem clear at first sight it is, I think, because we do not consider our experiences as a whole. A limited group of experiences—say Faraday's experiments with electro-magnets—may guide us into new knowledge about the external world, including aspects of that world which are not open to sense perception. But then these experiences assume that this external world exists, they assume it to be independent of perception, they assume it to be a cause of perception. These assumptions once granted, experiment may be, and is, the source of fresh discoveries. But experiment based on these assumptions never can establish their truth; and if our theory of knowledge requires us to hold that ‘no proposition should be entertained with greater assurance than the proofs it is built on will warrant,’ our fate is sealed, and we need never hope to extricate ourselves from the entanglements in which a too credulous empiricism has involved us. This means that one at least of the inevitable beliefs enumerated in the first lecture—the belief in an external world—is a postulate which science is compelled to use but is unable to demonstrate. How, then, are we to class it? It is not a law of thought in the accepted meaning of that expression. We are not rationally required to accept it by the very structure of our thinking faculties. Many people, indeed, theoretically reject it; none, so far as I know, regard it as self-evident. On the other hand, it is not an inference from experience; neither is it an analytic judgment in which the predicate is involved in the subject. Described in technical language, it would seem to be a priori without being necessary, and synthetic without being empirical—qualities which, in combination, scarcely fit into any familiar philosophic classification.

According to the view which I desire to press in these lectures, this marks a philosophic omission. I regard the belief in an external world as one of a class whose importance has been ignored by philosophy, though all science depends on them. They refuse to be lost in the common herd of empirical beliefs; though they have no claim to be treated as axioms. We are inclined to accept them, but not rationally compelled. The inclination may be so strong as practically to exclude doubt; and it may diminish from this maximum to a faint feeling of probability. But, whatever be the strength of these beliefs, and whatever the nature of their claims, the importance of the part they play in the development and structure of our current creed cannot easily be exaggerated.

Before, however, I consider other specimens of this class, I must interpolate a long parenthesis upon probability. I have just described these fundamental beliefs as being ‘probable’ in varying degrees. Gradations of probability are familiar to the mathematical theorist. Are we, then, here concerned with probability as conceived by the mathematician? It is evidently essential to settle this question before proceeding with the main argument; and I propose, therefore, to turn aside and devote the next lecture to its consideration.