Mysticism and Logic and Other EssaysRussell, Bertrand
Philosophy
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
Russell, Bertrand
Mathematics; Philosophy; Science
percipient, we found, is a more complicated matter than it appears to
be, and, like all causal dependence, is apt to give rise to erroneous
beliefs through misconceptions as to the nature of causal correlation.
If we have been right in our contentions, sense-data are merely those
among the ultimate constituents of the physical world, of which we
happen to be immediately aware; they themselves are purely physical,
and all that is mental in connection with them is our awareness of
them, which is irrelevant to their nature and to their place in
physics.
Unduly simple notions as to space have been a great stumbling-block to
realists. When two men look at the same table, it is supposed that
what the one sees and what the other sees are in the same place. Since
the shape and colour are not quite the same for the two men, this
raises a difficulty, hastily solved, or rather covered up, by
declaring what each sees to be purely "subjective"--though it would
puzzle those who use this glib word to say what they mean by it. The
truth seems to be that space--and time also--is much more complicated
than it would appear to be from the finished structure of physics, and
that the one all-embracing three-dimensional space is a logical
construction, obtained by means of correlations from a crude space of
six dimensions. The particulars occupying this six-dimensional space,
classified in one way, form "things," from which with certain further
manipulations we can obtain what physics can regard as matter;
classified in another way, they form "perspectives" and "biographies,"
which may, if a suitable percipient happens to exist, form
respectively the sense-data of a momentary or of a total experience.
It is only when physical "things" have been dissected into series of
classes of particulars, as we have done, that the conflict between the
point of view of physics and the point of view of psychology can be
overcome. This conflict, if what has been said is not mistaken, flows
from different methods of classification, and vanishes as soon as its
source is discovered.
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