An Introduction to Philosophy

AN EXTERN

he "minute philosophers." They denied the immortality of the soul; he affirmed it; and he congratulated him

in earnest, be so skeptical as to be uncertain of the existence of those things which he sees and feels. At least, he that can doubt so far (whateve

them, some of the problems that have presented themselves to those who have reflected upon the world and the mind as they see

nd is yet quite unable to find any flaw in the reasonings of the man who seems to be able to show that this belief has no solid foundation. And we must not forget that the men who have thought it worth while to rai

can know that there is an external world, it is not unreasonable to expect that, by looking for it, we may find in our common experience or in science s

ld, and that he, at the same time, believes that he does directly perceive one. It is quite possible to believe contr

blind man does not see things when they are there; a color-blind man sees them as others do not see them; a man suffering under certain abnormal conditions of the nervous system sees things when they are not there at all, i.e. he has hallucinations. The thing itself, as it seems, is not in the man's mind; it is the idea that is i

I only maintain that it seems a natural conclusion to draw from the facts which h

as and things, but is looking at some material object before him, is touching it with his fingers and turning

f himself as occupied with mere images, representations of the object. He may be willing to admit that his mind is in his head, but he cannot think that what he sees is in his head. Is not the o

don the other one? If we elect to do this, we appear to be in difficulties at once. All the considerations which made us distinguish so carefully between our ideas of things and the things themselves crowd in upon us. Can it be that

s the extension of knowledge offered him by the man of science, he must admit that, whatever this apparently immediately perceived external thing may be, it cannot be the external thing that science assures him is out th

By judiciously asking questions one may often lead him either to affirm or to deny that he has an immediate knowledge of the external world, pretty much as one pleases. If he affirms it, his position does not seem to be a wh

when things are present and affect the senses, there come into being ideas which represent the things? Evidently such a proof as this is out of the question, for, if it is true that we know external things only by inference and never immediately, then we can never prove by observation that ideas and things are

d things, appearances and the realities which they are supposed to represent. The psychologist has much to say about ideas; and if sharpening and making clear this distinction has anything

een brought to the mind by means of the bodily senses. He describes the sense-organs and the nervous connections between these and the brain, and

only by the fact that a message from the thing is sent along the nerves, and what the thing is must be determined from the character of the message. Given the image in the absence of the thing,—that is to say, an hallucination,—the mind will naturally suppose that the thing is present. This false supposition cannot be corrected by a direct inspection of the th

ulse has been carried along a sensory nerve and has reached the brain, if every mind is shut up to the charmed circle of its own ideas? The anatomist and the physiologist give us very detailed accounts of the sense-organs and of the brain; the physiologist even undertakes to measure the speed with which the impulse passes along a nerve; the psychologist accepts and uses the results of their labors. But can all this be done in the absence of any first-hand knowledge of

right to assume, with the plain man, that there is an external world and that we know it. But a very little reflection must make it manifest tha

matter and to dissipate his doubt one has to go rather deeply into metaphysics. I merely wish to show just here that the doubt is not a gratuitous one, but is really suggested to the thoughtful mind by a reflection upon our experience of things. And, as we ar

ral telephone exchange who cannot get nearer to his customers than his end of the telephone wires. We are indeed worse off than the clerk, for to carry out the analogy properly we must suppose him never to have been outside the telephone exchange, never to have seen a customer or any one like a customer—in short, never, except through the telephone wire, to have come in contact with the outside universe. Of that 'real' universe outside himself he would be able to form no direct impression; the real universe for him would be the aggregate of his constructs from the messages which were caused by the telephone wires in his office. About those messages and the ideas raised in his mind by them he might reason and draw his inferences; and his conclusions would be correct—for what? For the world of telephonic messages, for the type of messages that go through the telephone. Someth

ng is to employ one subscriber to your telephone exchange to tell you about the wire that goes to a second, but you are just as far as ever from tracing out for yourself the telephone wires to the individual subscriber and ascertaining what his nature is in and for himself. The immediate sense-impression is just as far removed from what you term the 'outside world' as the store of impresses. If our telephone clerk had recorded by aid of a phonograph certain of the messages from the outside world on past occasions, then if any telephonic message on its receipt set several phonographs repeating past messages, we have an image analogous to what goes on in the brain. Both telephone and

widely divergent from the thing 'at the other end of the nerve' as the sound of the telephone from the subscriber at the other end of the wire. We are cribbed and confined in this world of sense-impressions like the exchange clerk in his world of sounds, and not a step beyond can we get. As his world is conditioned and limited by his particular network of wires, so ours is conditioned by our nervous system, by our organs of sense. Their peculiarities determine what is the nature of the outside world which we construct. It

the position of the clerk in the telephone exchange, i.e. the position of the mind in the body, as depicted by Professor Pearson, bef

the bitter end in the conclusion that, since we have never had experience of anything beyond sense-impressions, and have no ground for an inference to anything beyond, we must recognize that the only external world of which we know anything is an external world built up out of sense-i

is mind to do this, I beg hi

onstruct in the mind or ego, we may certainly affirm that the world is in the

ies, sense-organs, nerves, and brains, are really inside and are merely projected outwards. Now, do the sense-i

we picture to ourselves "the conscious ego of each one of us seated at the brain terminals of the sensory nerves"? How can the ego place the whole of itself at t

at the end of it without being in the mind? And if the thing in question is not in the mind, how are we going to prove that it is any nearer to one end of a nerve which is inside the

nly sounds and must build up his whole universe of things out of sounds. Now we are supposing him to be in a telephone exchange, to be receiving messages, to be building up a world out of these messages. Do we for a moment think of him as building up, out of the messages which came along the wires, those identical wires which carried the messages and the subscribers which sent them? Never! w

be without. Suppose it is nonsense to speak of a wire which is not in the mind of a clerk. May we under such circumstances describe any clerk as in a telephone exchange? as receiving messages? as no nearer to his subscribers than his end of the wire? May we say that sense-im

uch discredited, and is yet not actually discarded. The ego is placed at the brain terminals of the sensory nerves, and it receives messages which flow in; i.e. the clerk is actually placed in an

of the external world that we all seem to perceive and that we somehow recognize as distinct from

ensations to which they give rise? We cannot, surely, do that. Shall we affirm that we know the external world directly, and at the same time that we do not kn

in his experiences. We find that all attempts to discredit it rest upon the implicit assumption of its existence, and fall to the ground when that existence is honestly denie

e," 2d Ed., London, 1900,