Mysticism and Logic and Other EssaysRussell, Bertrand
Philosophy
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
Russell, Bertrand
Mathematics; Philosophy; Science
upon my body has made people suppose that what I see cannot be
"outside" me. The first of these reasons need not detain us, since the
confusion only needs to be pointed out in order to be obviated; but
the second requires some discussion, since it can only be answered by
removing current misconceptions, on the one hand as to the nature of
space, and on the other, as to the meaning of causal dependence.
When people ask whether colours, for example, or other secondary
qualities are inside or outside the mind, they seem to suppose that
their meaning must be clear, and that it ought to be possible to say
yes or no without any further discussion of the terms involved. In
fact, however, such terms as "inside" or "outside" are very ambiguous.
What is meant by asking whether this or that is "in" the mind? The
mind is not like a bag or a pie; it does not occupy a certain region
in space, or, if (in a sense) it does, what is in that region is
presumably part of the brain, which would not be said to be in the
mind. When people say that sensible qualities are in the mind, they do
not mean "spatially contained in" in the sense in which the blackbirds
were in the pie. We might regard the mind as an assemblage of
particulars, namely, what would be called "states of mind," which
would belong together in virtue of some specific common quality. The
common quality of all states of mind would be the quality designated
by the word "mental"; and besides this we should have to suppose that
each separate person's states of mind have some common characteristic
distinguishing them from the states of mind of other people. Ignoring
this latter point, let us ask ourselves whether the quality designated
by the word "mental" does, as a matter of observation, actually belong
to objects of sense, such as colours or noises. I think any candid
person must reply that, however difficult it may be to know what we
mean by "mental," it is not difficult to see that colours and noises
are not mental in the sense of having that intrinsic peculiarity which
belongs to beliefs and wishes and volitions, but not to the physical
world. Berkeley advances on this subject a plausible argument[26]
which seems to me to rest upon an ambiguity in the word "pain." He
argues that the realist supposes the heat which he feels in
approaching a fire to be something outside his mind, but that as he
approaches nearer and nearer to the fire the sensation of heat passes
imperceptibly into pain, and that no one could regard pain as
something outside the mind. In reply to this argument, it should be
observed in the first place that the heat of which we are immediately
aware is not in the fire but in our own body. It is only by inference
that the fire is judged to be the cause of the heat which we feel in
our body. In the second place (and this is the more important point),
when we speak of pain we may mean one of two things: we may mean the
object of the sensation or other experience which has the quality of
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