meaning of ours seeks and demands an embodiment such that, to our minds, only outer Nature can furnish this embodiment? But so far, indeed, we have not seen what grounds distinguish our belief in matter from our belief in any other sort of Reality. What we are seeking, however, is an account of how our belief in the material world, as distinct from any other realm of acknowledged facts, is to be explained and defended.
Moreover, as has occasionally been pointed out, in the
course of various recent discussions of this view, the
natural truths which are of the most theoretical importance to
us, are often truths that result from an indirect interpretation
of facts with which the sense of resistance in any
direct muscular sense has very little to do. Do the
geometrical laws force themselves upon us by resisting our
will (except, to be sure, our will exhaustively to know
them)? The heavens have long been a type of the
apparently everlasting character of Nature. When did the
stars show themselves to be real by resisting our will,
except indeed by arousing questions that we cannot
at present answer?
II
In proceeding to suggest what I regard as a more adequate account of the warrant for our belief in the physical world, I must call attention to a plain fact which, as I conceive, has far too often been wholly neglected in the discussion of this subject. Our belief in the reality of Nature, when Nature is taken to mean the realm of physical phenomena known to common sense and to science, is inseparably bound up with our belief in the existence of our
