The real point seems to be this: some events have effects which radiate
all round them, and can therefore produce reactions in a number of
observers; of these, ordinary speech is an illustration. But other
events produce effects which travel linearly, not spherically; of
these, speech into a telephone from a sound-proof telephone box may
serve as an illustration. This can be heard by only one person beside
the speaker; if instead of a speaker we had an instrument at the
mouthpiece, only one person could hear the sound, namely the person
at the other end of the telephone. Events which happen inside a human
body are like the noise in the telephone: they have effects, in the
main, which travel along nerves to the brain, instead of spreading
out in all directions equally. Consequently, a man can know a great
deal about his own body which another man can only know indirectly.
Another man can see the hole in my tooth, but he cannot feel my
toothache. If he infers that I feel toothache, he still does not have
the very same knowledge that I have; he may use the same words, but
the stimulus to his use of them is different from the stimulus to
mine, and I can be acutely aware of the pain which is the stimulus to
my words. In all these ways a man has knowledge concerning his own
body which is obtained differently from the way in which he obtains
knowledge of other bodies. This peculiar knowledge is, in one sense,
“introspective”, though not quite in the sense that Dr. Watson denies.
(5) We come now to the real crux of the whole matter, namely to the
question: Do we think? This question is very ambiguous, so long as
“thinking” has not been clearly defined. Perhaps we may state the
matter thus: Do we know events in us which would not be included in
an absolutely complete knowledge of physics? I mean by a complete
knowledge of physics a knowledge not only of physical laws, but also
of what we may call geography, _i.e._ the distribution of energy
throughout space-time. If the question is put in this way, I think it
is quite clear that we do know things not included in physics. A blind
man could know the whole of physics, but he could not know what things
look like to people who can see, nor what is the difference between
red and blue as seen. He could know all about wave-lengths, but people
knew the difference between red and blue as seen before they knew
anything about wave-lengths. The person who knows physics and can see
knows that a certain wave-length will give him a sensation of red, but
this knowledge is not part of physics. Again, we know what we mean by
“pleasant” and “unpleasant”, and we do not know this any better when
we have discovered that pleasant things have one kind of physiological
effect and unpleasant things have another. If we did not already know
what things are pleasant and what unpleasant, we could never have
discovered this correlation. But the knowledge that certain things are
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