It is not solely the scientific world that will now occupy our attention. In accordance with the last chapter we are taking a larger [Pg 275] view in which the cyclical schemes of physics are embraced with much besides. But before venturing on this more risky ground I have to emphasise one conclusion which is definitely scientific. The modern scientific theories have broken away from the common standpoint which identifies the real with the concrete. I think we might go so far as to say that time is more typical of physical reality than matter, because it is freer from those metaphysical associations which physics disallows. It would not be fair, being given an inch, to take an ell, and say that having gone so far physics may as well admit at once that reality is spiritual. We must go more warily. But in approaching such questions we are no longer tempted to take up the attitude that everything which lacks concreteness is thereby self-condemned. The cleavage between the scientific and the extra-scientific domain of experience is, I believe, not a cleavage between the concrete and the transcendental but between the metrical and the non-metrical. I am at one with the materialist in feeling a repugnance towards any kind of pseudo-science of the extra-scientific territory. Science is not to be condemned as narrow because it refuses to deal with elements of experience which are unadapted to its own highly organised method; nor can it be blamed for looking superciliously on the comparative disorganisation of our knowledge and methods of reasoning about the non-metrical part of experience. But I think we have not been guilty of pseudo-science in our attempt to show in the last two chapters how it comes about that within the whole domain of experience a selected portion is capable of that exact metrical representation which is requisite for development by the scientific method. [Pg 276] Mind-Stuff. I will try to be as definite as I can as to the glimpse of reality which we seem to have reached. Only I am well aware that in committing myself to details I shall probably blunder. Even if the right view has here been taken of the philosophical trend of modern science, it is premature to suggest a cut-and-dried scheme of the nature of things. If the criticism is made that certain aspects are touched on which come more within the province of the expert psychologist, I must admit its pertinence. The recent tendencies of science do, I believe, take us to an eminence from which we can look down into the deep waters of philosophy; and if I rashly plunge into them, it is not because I have confidence in my powers of swimming, but to try to show that the water is really deep.