Mysticism and Logic and Other EssaysRussell, Bertrand
Philosophy
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
Russell, Bertrand
Mathematics; Philosophy; Science
The relevance of this to the experience which we call "seeing the sun"
is obvious. The fact that there exists a chain of antecedents which
makes our seeing dependent upon the eyes and nerves and brain does not
even tend to show that there is not another chain of antecedents in
which the eyes and nerves and brain as physical things are ignored. If
we are to escape from the dilemma which seemed to arise out of the
physiological causation of what we see when we say we see the sun, we
must find, at least in theory, a way of stating causal laws for the
physical world, in which the units are not material things, such as
the eyes and nerves and brain, but momentary particulars of the same
sort as our momentary visual object when we look at the sun. The sun
itself and the eyes and nerves and brain must be regarded as
assemblages of momentary particulars. Instead of supposing, as we
naturally do when we start from an uncritical acceptance of the
apparent dicta of physics, that _matter_ is what is "really real" in
the physical world, and that the immediate objects of sense are mere
phantasms, we must regard matter as a logical construction, of which
the constituents will be just such evanescent particulars as may, when
an observer happens to be present, become data of sense to that
observer. What physics regards as the sun of eight minutes ago will be
a whole assemblage of particulars, existing at different times,
spreading out from a centre with the velocity of light, and containing
among their number all those visual data which are seen by people who
are now looking at the sun. Thus the sun of eight minutes ago is a
class of particulars, and what I see when I now look at the sun is one
member of this class. The various particulars constituting this class
will be correlated with each other by a certain continuity and certain
intrinsic laws of variation as we pass outwards from the centre,
together with certain modifications correlated extrinsically with
other particulars which are not members of this class. It is these
extrinsic modifications which represent the sort of facts that, in our
former account, appeared as the influence of the eyes and nerves in
modifying the appearance of the sun.[28]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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