“We cannot conceive of movement apart from some _thing_ as moving.”
This is, in a sense, a truism; but in the sense in which it is usually
meant, it is a falsehood. We speak of the “movement” of a drama or
piece of music, although we do not conceive either as a “thing” which
exists complete at every moment of the performance. This is the sort of
picture we must have in our minds when we try to conceive the physical
world. We must think of a string of events, connected together by
certain causal connections, and having enough unity to deserve a single
name. We then begin to imagine that the single name denotes a single
“thing”, and if the events concerned are not all in the same place, we
say the “thing” has “moved.” But this is only a convenient shorthand.
In the cinema, we seem to see a man falling off a skyscraper, catching
hold of the telegraph wires, and reaching the ground none the worse.
We know that, in fact, there are a number of different photographs,
and the appearance of a single “thing” moving is deceptive. In this
respect, the real world resembles the cinema.
In connection with motion one needs to emphasise the very difficult
distinction between _experience_ and _prejudice_. Experience, roughly,
is what you see, and prejudice is what you only think you see.
Prejudice tells you that you see the _same_ table on two different
occasions; you _think_ that experience tells you this. If it really
were experience, you could not be mistaken; yet a similar table may be
substituted without altering the experience. If you look at a table
on two different occasions, you have very similar sensations, and
memory tells you that they are similar; but there is nothing to show
that one identical entity causes the two sensations. If the table is
in a cinema, you know that there is not such an entity, even though
you can watch it changing with apparent continuity. The experience is
just like that with a “real” table; so in the case of a “real” table
also, there is nothing in the actual experience to show whether there
is a persistent entity or not. I say, therefore: I do not know whether
there is a persistent entity, but I do know that my experiences can be
explained without assuming that there is. Therefore it can be no part
of legitimate science to assert or deny the persistent entity; if it
does either, it goes beyond the warrant of experience.
The following is a verbally cited passage in the letter referred to
objecting to what was said above about “force”:
“The concept of Force is not of physical but of psychological origin.
Rightly or wrongly it arises in the most impersonal contemplation of
the Stellar Universe, where we observe an infinite number of spherical
bodies revolving on their own axes and gyrating in orbits round each
other. Rightly or wrongly, we naturally conceive of these as having
been so constituted and so maintained by some Force or Forces.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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