Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
PHILOSOPHY
PHILOSOPHY
_By_
Bertrand Russell
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
W · W · NORTON & COMPANY, INC.
_Publishers_
Copyright, 1927,
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Published in Great Britain under the title “An Outline of Philosophy”
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOR THE PUBLISHERS BY THE VAN REES PRESS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. PHILOSOPHIC DOUBTS 1
PART I
MAN FROM WITHOUT
II. MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 16
III. THE PROCESS OF LEARNING IN ANIMALS AND INFANTS 29
IV. LANGUAGE 43
V. PERCEPTION OBJECTIVELY REGARDED 58
VI. MEMORY OBJECTIVELY REGARDED 70
VII. INFERENCE AS A HABIT 79
VIII. KNOWLEDGE BEHAVIOURISTICALLY CONSIDERED 88
PART II
THE PHYSICAL WORLD
IX. THE STRUCTURE OF THE ATOM 97
X. RELATIVITY 107
XI. CAUSAL LAWS IN PHYSICS 114
XII. PHYSICS AND PERCEPTION 123
XIII. PHYSICAL AND PERCEPTUAL SPACE 137
XIV. PERCEPTION AND PHYSICAL CAUSAL LAWS 144
XV. THE NATURE OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF PHYSICS 151
PART III
MAN FROM WITHIN
XVI. SELF-OBSERVATION 161
XVII. IMAGES 176
XVIII. IMAGINATION AND MEMORY 187
XIX. THE INTROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF PERCEPTION 201
XX. CONSCIOUSNESS? 210
XXI. EMOTION, DESIRE, AND WILL 218
XXII. ETHICS 225
PART IV
THE UNIVERSE
XXIII. SOME GREAT PHILOSOPHIES OF THE PAST 236
XXIV. TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD 254
XXV. THE VALIDITY OF INFERENCE 266
XXVI. EVENTS, MATTER, AND MIND 276
XXVII. MAN’S PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE 292
PHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER I
PHILOSOPHIC DOUBTS
Perhaps it might be expected that I should begin with a definition
of “philosophy”, but, rightly or wrongly, I do not propose to do so.
The definition of “philosophy” will vary according to the philosophy
we adopt; all that we can say to begin with is that there are certain
problems, which certain people find interesting, and which do not, at
least at present, belong to any of the special sciences. These problems
are all such as to raise doubts concerning what commonly passes for
knowledge; and if the doubts are to be answered, it can only be by
means of a special study, to which we give the name “philosophy”.
Therefore the first step in defining “philosophy” is the indication of
these problems and doubts, which is also the first step in the actual
study of philosophy. There are some among the traditional problems of
philosophy that do not seem to me to lend themselves to intellectual
treatment, because they transcend our cognitive powers; such problems I
shall not deal with. There are others, however, as to which, even if a
final solution is not possible at present, yet much can be done to show
the direction in which a solution is to be sought, and the _kind_ of
solution that may in time prove possible.
Philosophy arises from an unusually obstinate attempt to arrive at real
knowledge. What passes for knowledge in ordinary life suffers from
three defects: it is cocksure, vague, and self-contradictory. The first
step towards philosophy consists in becoming aware of these defects,
not in order to rest content with a lazy scepticism, but in order to
substitute an amended kind of knowledge which shall be tentative,
precise, and self-consistent. There is of course another quality
which we wish our knowledge to possess, namely comprehensiveness: we
wish the area of our knowledge to be as wide as possible. But this
is the business of science rather than of philosophy. A man does
not necessarily become a better philosopher through knowing more
scientific facts; it is principles and methods and general conceptions
that he should learn from science if philosophy is what interests
him. The philosopher’s work is, so to speak, at the second remove
from crude fact. Science tries to collect facts into bundles by means
of scientific laws; these laws, rather than the original facts, are
the raw material of philosophy. Philosophy involves a criticism of
scientific knowledge, not from a point of view ultimately different
from that of science, but from a point of view less concerned with
details and more concerned with the harmony of the whole body of
special sciences.
The special sciences have all grown up by the use of notions derived
from common sense, such as things and their qualities, space, time, and
causation. Science itself has shown that none of these common-sense
notions will quite serve for the explanation of the world; but it
is hardly the province of any special science to undertake the
necessary reconstruction of fundamentals. This must be the business
of philosophy. I want to say, to begin with, that I believe it to be
a business of very great importance. I believe that the philosophical
errors in common-sense beliefs not only produce confusion in science,
but also do harm in ethics and politics, in social institutions, and
in the conduct of everyday life. It will be no part of my business, in
this volume, to point out these practical effects of a bad philosophy:
my business will be purely intellectual. But if I am right, the
intellectual adventures which lie before us have effects in many
directions which seem, at first sight, quite remote from our theme. The
effect of our passions upon our beliefs forms a favourite subject of
modern psychologists; but the converse effect, that of our beliefs upon
our passions, also exists, though it is not such as an old-fashioned
intellectualist psychology would have supposed. Although I shall not
discuss it, we shall do well to bear it in mind, in order to realise
that our discussions may have bearings upon matters lying outside the
sphere of pure intellect.
I mentioned a moment ago three defects in common beliefs, namely, that
they are cocksure, vague, and self-contradictory. It is the business of
philosophy to correct these defects so far as it can, without throwing
over knowledge altogether. To be a good philosopher, a man must have a
strong desire to know, combined with great caution in believing that
he knows; he must also have logical acumen and the habit of exact
thinking. All these, of course, are a matter of degree. Vagueness,
in particular, belongs, in some degree, to all human thinking; we
can diminish it indefinitely, but we can never abolish it wholly.
Philosophy, accordingly, is a continuing activity, not something
in which we can achieve final perfection once for all. In this
respect, philosophy has suffered from its association with theology.
Theological dogmas are fixed, and are regarded by the orthodox as
incapable of improvement. Philosophers have too often tried to produce
similarly final systems: they have not been content with the gradual
approximations that satisfied men of science. In this they seem to me
to have been mistaken. Philosophy should be piecemeal and provisional
like science; final truth belongs to heaven, not to this world.
The three defects which I have mentioned are interconnected, and by
becoming aware of any one we may be led to recognise the other two. I
will illustrate all three by a few examples.
Let us take first the belief in common objects, such as tables and
chairs and trees. We all feel quite sure about these in ordinary
life, and yet our reasons for confidence are really very inadequate.
Naive common sense supposes that they are what they appear to be, but
that is impossible, since they do not appear exactly alike to any two
simultaneous observers; at least, it is impossible if the object is
a single thing, the same for all observers. If we are going to admit
that the object is not what we see, we can no longer feel the same
assurance that there is an object; this is the first intrusion of
doubt. However, we shall speedily recover from this set-back, and say
that of course the object is “really” what physics says it is.[1] Now
physics says that a table or a chair is “really” an incredibly vast
system of electrons and protons in rapid motion, with empty space in
between. This is all very well. But the physicist, like the ordinary
man, is dependent upon his senses for the existence of the physical
world. If you go up to him solemnly and say, “would you be so kind as
to tell me, as a physicist, what a chair really is”, you will get a
learned answer. But if you say, without preamble: “Is there a chair
there?” he will say: “Of course there is; can’t you see it?” To this
you ought to reply in the negative. You ought to say, “No, I see
certain patches of colour, but I don’t see any electrons or protons,
and you tell me that they are what a chair consists of”. He may reply:
“Yes, but a large number of electrons and protons close together look
like a patch of colour”. What do you mean by “look like”? you will
then ask. He is ready with an answer. He means that light-waves start
from the electrons and protons (or, more probably, are reflected by
them from a source of light), reach the eye, have a series of effects
upon the rods and cones, the optic nerve, and the brain, and finally
produce a sensation. But he has never seen an eye or an optic nerve or
a brain, any more than he has seen a chair; he has only seen patches of
colour which, he says, are what eyes “look like.” That is to say, he
thinks that the sensation you have when (as you think) you see a chair,
has a series of causes, physical and psychological, but all of them,
on his own showing, lie essentially and forever outside experience.
Nevertheless, he pretends to base his science upon observation.
Obviously there is here a problem for the logician, a problem belonging
not to physics, but to quite another kind of study. This is a first
example of the way in which the pursuit of precision destroys certainty.
[1] I am not thinking here of the elementary physics to be
found in a school text-book; I am thinking of modern
theoretical physics, more particularly as regards the
structure of atoms, as to which I shall have more to say
in later chapters.
The physicist believes that he infers his electrons and protons from
what he perceives. But the inference is never clearly set forth in
a logical chain, and, if it were, it might not look sufficiently
plausible to warrant much confidence. In actual fact, the whole
development from common-sense objects to electrons and protons has
been governed by certain beliefs, seldom conscious, but existing in
every natural man. These beliefs are not unalterable, but they grow
and develop like a tree. We start by thinking that a chair is as it
appears to be, and is still there when we are not looking. But we find,
by a little reflection, that these two beliefs are incompatible. If
the chair is to persist independently of being seen by us, it must
be something other than the patch of colour we see, because this is
found to depend upon conditions extraneous to the chair, such as how
the light falls, whether we are wearing blue spectacles, and so on.
This forces the man of science to regard the “real” chair as the cause
(or an indispensable part of the cause) of our sensations when we see
the chair. Thus we are committed to causation as an _a priori_ belief
without which we should have no reason for supposing that there is a
“real” chair at all. Also, for the sake of permanence we bring in the
notion of substance: the “real” chair is a substance, or collection of
substances, possessed of permanence and the power to cause sensations.
This metaphysical belief has operated, more or less unconsciously, in
the inference from sensations to electrons and protons. The philosopher
must drag such beliefs into the light of day, and see whether they
still survive. Often it will be found that they die on exposure.
Let us now take up another point. The evidence for a physical law, or
for any scientific law, always involves both memory and testimony. We
have to rely both upon what we remember to have observed on former
occasions, and on what others say they have observed. In the very
beginnings of science, it may have been possible sometimes to dispense
with testimony; but very soon every scientific investigation began
to be built upon previously ascertained results, and thus to depend
upon what others had recorded. In fact, without the corroboration of
testimony we should hardly have had much confidence in the existence
of physical objects. Sometimes people suffer from hallucinations, that
is to say, they think they perceive physical objects, but are not
confirmed in this belief by the testimony of others. In such cases,
we decide that they are mistaken. It is the similarity between the
perceptions of different people in similar situations that makes us
feel confident of the external causation of our perceptions; but for
this, whatever naive beliefs we might have had in physical objects
would have been dissipated long ago. Thus memory and testimony are
essential to science. Nevertheless, each of these is open to criticism
by the sceptic. Even if we succeed, more or less, in meeting his
criticism, we shall, if we are rational, be left with a less complete
confidence in our original beliefs than we had before. Once more, we
shall become less cocksure as we become more accurate.
Both memory and testimony lead us into the sphere of psychology. I
shall not at this stage discuss either beyond the point at which it is
clear that there are genuine philosophical problems to be solved. I
shall begin with memory.
Memory is a word which has a variety of meanings. The kind that I am
concerned with at the moment is the recollection of past occurrences.
This is so notoriously fallible that every experimenter makes a record
of the result of his experiment at the earliest possible moment: he
considers the inference from written words to past events less likely
to be mistaken than the direct beliefs which constitute memory. But
some time, though perhaps only a few seconds, must elapse between
the observation and the making of the record, unless the record is
so fragmentary that memory is needed to interpret it. Thus we do not
escape from the need of trusting memory to some degree. Moreover,
without memory we should not think of interpreting records as applying
to the past, because we should not know that there was any past. Now,
apart from arguments as to the proved fallibility of memory, there is
one awkward consideration which the sceptic may urge. Remembering,
which occurs now, cannot possibly--he may say--prove that what is
remembered occurred at some other time, because the world might have
sprung into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, full of
acts of remembering which were entirely misleading. Opponents of
Darwin, such as Edmund Gosse’s father, urged a very similar argument
against evolution. The world, they said, was created in 4004 B.C.,
complete with fossils, which were inserted to try our faith. The world
was created suddenly, but was made such as it would have been if it
had evolved. There is no logical impossibility about this view. And
similarly there is no logical impossibility in the view that the world
was created five minutes ago, complete with memories and records. This
may seem an improbable hypothesis, but it is not logically refutable.
Apart from this argument, which may be thought fantastic, there are
reasons of detail for being more or less distrustful of memory. It
is obvious that no _direct_ confirmation of a belief about a past
occurrence is possible, because we cannot make the past recur. We can
find confirmation of an indirect kind in the revelations of others and
in contemporary records. The latter, as we have seen, involve some
degree of memory, but they may involve very little, for instance when
a shorthand report of a conversation or speech has been made at the
time. But even then, we do not escape wholly from the need of memory
extending over a longer stretch of time. Suppose a wholly imaginary
conversation were produced for some criminal purpose, we should depend
upon the memories of witnesses to establish its fictitious character in
a law-court. And all memory which extends over a long period of time is
very apt to be mistaken; this is shown by the errors invariably found
in autobiographies. Any man who comes across letters which he wrote
many years ago can verify the manner in which his memory has falsified
past events. For these reasons, the fact that we cannot free ourselves
from dependence upon memory in building up knowledge is, _prima facie_,
a reason for regarding what passes for knowledge as not quite certain.
The whole of this subject of memory will be considered more carefully
in later chapters.
Testimony raises even more awkward problems. What makes them so awkward
is the fact that testimony is involved in building up our knowledge
of physics, and that, conversely, physics is required in establishing
the trustworthiness of testimony. Moreover, testimony raises all the
problems connected with the relation of mind and matter. Some eminent
philosophers, _e.g._ Leibniz, have constructed systems according to
which there would be no such thing as testimony, and yet have accepted
as true many things which cannot be known without it. I do not think
philosophy has quite done justice to this problem, but a few words
will, I think, show its gravity.
For our purposes, we may define testimony as noises heard, or shapes
seen, analogous to those which we should make if we wished to convey
an assertion, and believed by the hearer or seer to be due to someone
else’s desire to convey an assertion. Let us take a concrete instance:
I ask a policeman the way, and he says, “Fourth turn to the right,
third to the left.” That is to say, I hear these sounds, and perhaps I
see what I interpret as his lips moving. I assume that he has a mind
more or less like my own, and has uttered these sounds with the same
intention as I should have had if I had uttered them, namely to convey
information. In ordinary life, all this is not, in any proper sense,
an inference; it is a belief which arises in us on the appropriate
occasion. But if we are challenged, we have to substitute inference for
spontaneous belief, and the more the inference is examined the more
shaky it looks.
The inference that has to be made has two steps, one physical and one
psychological. The physical inference is of the sort we considered a
moment ago, in which we pass from a sensation to a physical occurrence.
We hear noises, and think they proceed from the policeman’s body. We
see moving shapes, and interpret them as physical motions of his
lips. This inference, as we saw earlier, is in part justified by
testimony; yet now we find that it has to be made before we can have
reason to believe that there is any such thing as testimony. And this
inference is certainly sometimes mistaken. Lunatics hear voices which
other people do not hear; instead of crediting them with abnormally
acute hearing, we lock them up. But if we sometimes hear sentences
which have not proceeded from a body, why should this not always be
the case? Perhaps our imagination has conjured up all the things that
we think others have said to us. But this is part of the general
problem of inferring physical objects from sensations, which, difficult
as it is, is not the most difficult part of the logical puzzles
concerning testimony. The most difficult part is the inference from
the policeman’s body to his mind. I do not mean any special insult to
policemen; I would say the same of politicians and even of philosophers.
The inference to the policeman’s mind certainly _may_ be wrong. It is
clear that a maker of wax-works could make a life-like policeman and
put a gramophone inside him, which would cause him periodically to
tell visitors the way to the most interesting part of the exhibition
at the entrance to which he would stand. They would have just the sort
of evidence of his being alive that is found convincing in the case of
other policemen. Descartes believed that animals have no minds, but are
merely complicated automata. Eighteenth-century materialists extended
this doctrine to men. But I am not now concerned with materialism; my
problem is a different one. Even a materialist must admit that, when he
talks, he means to convey something, that is to say, he uses words as
signs, not as mere noises. It may be difficult to decide exactly what
is meant by this statement, but it is clear that it means something,
and that it is true of one’s own remarks. The question is: Are we sure
that it is true of the remarks we hear, as well as of those we make?
Or are the remarks we hear perhaps just like other noises, merely
meaningless disturbances of the air? The chief argument against this
is analogy: the remarks we hear are so like those we make that we think
they must have similar causes. But although we cannot dispense with
analogy as a form of inference, it is by no means demonstrative, and
not infrequently leads us astray. We are therefore left, once more,
with a _prima facie_ reason for uncertainty and doubt.
This question of what we mean ourselves when we speak brings me to
another problem, that of introspection. Many philosophers have held
that introspection gave the most indubitable of all knowledge; others
have held that there is no such thing as introspection. Descartes,
after trying to doubt everything, arrived at “I think, therefore I
am”, as a basis for the rest of knowledge. Dr. John B. Watson the
behaviourist holds, on the contrary, that we do not think, but only
talk. Dr. Watson, in real life, gives as much evidence of thinking as
anyone does, so if _he_ is not convinced that he thinks, we are all
in a bad way. At any rate, the mere existence of such an opinion as
his, on the part of a competent philosopher, must suffice to show that
introspection is not so certain as some people have thought. But let us
examine this question a little more closely.
The difference between introspection and what we call perception of
external objects seems to me to be connected, not with what is primary
in our knowledge, but with what is inferred. We think, at one time,
that we are seeing a chair; at another, that we are thinking about
philosophy. The first we call perception of an external object; the
second we call introspection. Now we have already found reason to doubt
external perception, in the full-blooded sense in which common-sense
accepts it. I shall consider later what there is that is indubitable
and primitive in perception; for the moment, I shall anticipate by
saying that what is indubitable in “seeing a chair” is the occurrence
of a certain pattern of colours. But this occurrence, we shall find,
is connected with me just as much as with the chair; no one except
myself can see exactly the pattern that I see. There is thus something
subjective and private about what we take to be external perception,
but this is concealed by precarious extensions into the physical world.
I think introspection, on the contrary, involves precarious extensions
into the mental world: shorn of these, it is not very different from
external perception shorn of its extensions. To make this clear, I
shall try to show what we know to be occurring when, as we say, we
think about philosophy.
Suppose, as the result of introspection, you arrive at a belief which
you express in the words: “I am now believing that mind is different
from matter”. What do you know, apart from inferences, in such a case?
First of all, you must cut out the word “I”: the person who believes
is an inference, not part of what you know immediately. In the second
place, you must be careful about the word “believing”: I am not now
concerned with what this word should mean in logic or theory of
knowledge; I am concerned with what it can mean when used to describe
a direct experience. In such a case, it would seem that it can only
describe a certain kind of feeling. And as for the proposition you
think you are believing, namely, “mind is different from matter”,
it is very difficult to say what is really occurring when you think
you believe it. It may be mere words, pronounced, visualised, or in
auditory or motor images. It may be images of what the words “mean”,
but in that case it will not be at all an accurate representation of
the logical content of the proposition. You may have an image of a
statue of Newton “voyaging through strange seas of thought alone”, and
another image of a stone rolling downhill, combined with the words “how
different!” Or you may think of the difference between composing a
lecture and eating your dinner. It is only when you come to expressing
your thought in words that you approach logical precision.
Both in introspection and in external perception, we try to express
what we know in WORDS.
We come here, as in the question of testimony, upon the social aspect
of knowledge. The purpose of words is to give the same kind of
publicity to thought as is claimed for physical objects. A number of
people can hear a spoken word or see a written word, because each is a
physical occurrence. If I say to you, “mind is different from matter”,
there may be only a very slight resemblance between the thought that I
am trying to express and the thought which is aroused in you, but these
two thoughts have just this in common, that they can be expressed by
the same words. Similarly, there may be great differences between what
you and I see when, as we say, we look at the same chair; nevertheless
we can both express our perceptions by the same words.
A thought and a perception are thus not so very different in their own
nature. If physics is true, they are different in their correlations:
when I see a chair, others have more or less similar perceptions, and
it is thought that these are all connected with light-waves coming from
the chair, whereas, when I think a thought, others may not be thinking
anything similar. But this applies also to feeling a toothache, which
would not usually be regarded as a case of introspection. On the whole,
therefore, there seems no reason to regard introspection as a different
_kind_ of knowledge from external perception. But this whole question
will concern us again at a later stage.
As for the _trustworthiness_ of introspection, there is again a
complete parallelism with the case of external perception. The actual
datum, in each case, is unimpeachable, but the extensions which we make
instinctively are questionable. Instead of saying, “I am believing
that mind is different from matter”, you ought to say, “certain images
are occurring in a certain relation to each other, accompanied by a
certain feeling”. No words exist for describing the actual occurrence
in all its particularity; all words, even proper names, are general,
with the possible exception of “this”, which is ambiguous. When you
translate the occurrence into words, you are making generalisations and
inferences, just as you are when you say “there is a chair”. There is
really no vital difference between the two cases. In each case, what is
really a datum is unutterable, and what can be put into words involves
inferences which may be mistaken.
When I say that “inferences” are involved, I am saying something not
quite accurate unless carefully interpreted. In “seeing a chair”,
for instance, we do not first apprehend a coloured pattern, and then
proceed to infer a chair: belief in the chair arises spontaneously
when we see the coloured pattern. But this belief has causes not only
in the present physical stimulus, but also partly in past experience,
partly in reflexes. In animals, reflexes play a very large part; in
human beings, experience is more important. The infant learns slowly to
correlate touch and sight, and to expect others to see what he sees.
The habits which are thus formed are essential to our adult notion
of an object such as a chair. The perception of a chair by means of
sight has a physical stimulus which affects only sight directly, but
stimulates ideas of solidity and so on through early experience. The
inference might be called “physiological”. An inference of this sort is
evidence of past correlations, for instance between touch and sight,
but may be mistaken in the present instance; you may, for instance,
mistake a reflection in a large mirror for another room. Similarly in
dreams we make mistaken physiological inferences. We cannot therefore
feel certainty in regard to things which are in this sense inferred,
because, when we try to accept as many of them as possible, we are
nevertheless compelled to reject some for the sake of self-consistency.
We arrived a moment ago at what we called “physiological inference”
as an essential ingredient in the common-sense notion of a physical
object. Physiological inference, in its simplest form, means this:
given a stimulus S, to which, by a reflex, we react by a bodily
movement R, and a stimulus S′ with a reaction R′, if the two stimuli
are frequently experienced together, S will in time produce R′.[2]
That is to say, the body will act as if S′ were present. Physiological
inference is important in theory of knowledge, and I shall have much
to say about it at a later stage. For the present, I have mentioned it
partly to prevent it from being confused with logical inference, and
partly in order to introduce the problem of _induction_, about which we
must say a few preliminary words at this stage.
[2] _E.g._ if you hear a sharp noise and see a bright light
simultaneously often, in time the noise without the light
will cause your pupils to contract.
Induction raises perhaps the most difficult problem in the whole theory
of knowledge. Every scientific law is established by its means, and yet
it is difficult to see why we should believe it to be a valid logical
process. Induction, in its bare essence, consists of the argument that,
because A and B have been often found together and never found apart,
therefore, when A is found again, B will probably also be found. This
exists first as a “physiological inference”, and as such is practised
by animals. When we first begin to reflect, we find ourselves making
inductions in the physiological sense, for instance, expecting the
food we see to have a certain kind of taste. Often we only become
aware of this expectation through having it disappointed, for instance
if we take salt thinking it is sugar. When mankind took to science,
they tried to formulate logical principles justifying this kind of
inference. I shall discuss these attempts in later chapters; for the
present, I will only say that they seem to me very unsuccessful. I
am convinced that induction must have validity of some kind in some
degree, but the problem of showing how or why it can be valid remains
unsolved. Until it is solved, the rational man will doubt whether his
food will nourish him, and whether the sun will rise tomorrow. I am not
a rational man in this sense, but for the moment I shall pretend to be.
And even if we cannot be completely rational, we should probably all
be the better for becoming somewhat more rational than we are. At the
lowest estimate, it will be an interesting adventure to see whither
reason will lead us.
The problems we have been raising are none of them new, but they
suffice to show that our everyday views of the world and of our
relations to it are unsatisfactory. We have been asking whether we
know this or that, but we have not yet asked what “knowing” is. Perhaps
we shall find that we have had wrong ideas as to knowing, and that our
difficulties grow less when we have more correct ideas on this point. I
think we shall do well to begin our philosophical journey by an attempt
to understand knowing considered as part of the relation of man to his
environment, forgetting, for the moment, the fundamental doubts with
which we have been concerned. Perhaps modern science may enable us to
see philosophical problems in a new light. In that hope, let us examine
the relation of man to his environment with a view to arriving at a
scientific view as to what constitutes knowledge.
PART I
MAN FROM WITHOUT