Mysticism and Logic and Other EssaysRussell, Bertrand
Philosophy
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
Russell, Bertrand
Mathematics; Philosophy; Science
banging, but owing to the peculiar condition of the body (especially the
brain) during sleep, this appearance is not that expected to be produced
by a door banging, and thus the dreamer is led to entertain false
beliefs. But his sense-data are still physical, and are such as a
completed physics would include and calculate.
(4) The last class of illusions are those which cannot be discovered
within one person's experience, except through the discovery of
discrepancies with the experiences of others. Dreams might conceivably
belong to this class, if they were jointed sufficiently neatly into
waking life; but the chief instances are recurrent sensory
hallucinations of the kind that lead to insanity. What makes the
patient, in such cases, become what others call insane is the fact
that, within his own experience, there is nothing to show that the
hallucinatory sense-data do not have the usual kind of connection with
"sensibilia" in other perspectives. Of course he may learn this
through testimony, but he probably finds it simpler to suppose that
the testimony is untrue and that he is being wilfully deceived. There
is, so far as I can see, no theoretical criterion by which the patient
can decide, in such a case, between the two equally satisfactory
hypotheses of his madness and of his friends' mendacity.
From the above instances it would appear that abnormal sense-data, of
the kind which we regard as deceptive, have intrinsically just the
same status as any others, but differ as regards their correlations or
causal connections with other "sensibilia" and with "things." Since
the usual correlations and connections become part of our unreflective
expectations, and even seem, except to the psychologist, to form part
of our data, it comes to be thought, mistakenly, that in such cases
the data are unreal, whereas they are merely the causes of false
inferences. The fact that correlations and connections of unusual
kinds occur adds to the difficulty of inferring things from sense and
of expressing physics in terms of sense-data. But the unusualness
would seem to be always physically or physiologically explicable, and
therefore raises only a complication, not a philosophical objection.
I conclude, therefore, that no valid objection exists to the view
which regards sense-data as part of the actual substance of the
physical world, and that, on the other hand, this view is the only one
which accounts for the empirical verifiability of physics. In the
present paper, I have given only a rough preliminary sketch. In
particular, the part played by _time_ in the construction of the
physical world is, I think, more fundamental than would appear from
the above account. I should hope that, with further elaboration, the
part played by unperceived "sensibilia" could be indefinitely
diminished, probably by invoking the history of a "thing" to eke out
the inferences derivable from its momentary appearance.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] _Proc. Arist. Soc._, 1909-1910, pp. 191-218.
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