another. As already said, if sensation means anything more than a psychical event, it implies judgment; i.e. an act of thought. On the other hand, to attempt to think an unknown and unknowable material substance is to try to get outside thought, which is as impossible as to get outside one's skin and yet remain alive.
It might be said, however, that the element of matter in things is the as yet unknown element. This, I suppose, is the Aristotelian view. But can we then say that matter is the real ? If we did, we should be left with this difficulty, that as knowledge grows, reality diminishes — a position which the plain man would hardly be inclined to take up. If the reality of things be not their intelligibility, but just that element in them which cannot be known and cannot be expressed, should we not go on, in the fashion of Gorgias, to argue that nothing exists, that reality is that which is not?
The sciences ultimately refuse to recognize dualism. The world is only intelligible by science on the assumption that it forms one coherent system. A philosophy based on the special sciences cannot recognize anything outside the material universe. But then an examination of the nature of science (a criticism of the conditions of knowledge) shows us that the material universe can mean nothing except for thought.[1] Science leads us to Monism; and Monism, to be philosophic, must be idealistic.
When all this is said, the feeling somehow comes up that there must be some confusion between things and thoughts, between fact and theory. This feeling I believe to be entirely due to fallacies of language, to the habits of picture-thinking and the influence of old philosophical theories. What are facts (to put the question about reality in a different form)? Facts are theories. Is sunrise a fact? It is a theory, now discarded, to explain some of our sensations. The reality, we know, is not sunrise but the rotation of the earth: and yet we are in the
- ↑ The two views are not parallels standing on the same plane; because materialism logically presupposes idealism. The distinction between thought and matter falls within thought, as will be pointed out later.
