Woe! woe! Thou hast destroyed The beautiful world With violent blow; 'Tis shivered! 'Tis shattered! The fragments abroad by a demigod scatter'd. Now we sweep The wrecks into nothingness! Fondly we weep The beauty that's gone. - Faust. Nevertheless, the metaphysician of whatever type finds his world solid and comfortable. The supreme question with him is truth, and he believes his view is nearer the ultimate reality than either the plain man's appearances or the scientist's proximate causes. He remembers how startlingly the scientist reversed appearances in putting the sun in the center of the solar system, and he bids both the plain man and the scientist not to think it strange when a still more startling experience comes upon them along the same line. All we need to do is to get used to a new situation, and presently we shall feel at home. Such are the three worlds: the plain man's world of phenomena as they are presented to the senses; the scientist's world of proximate causes as they are traced by the observing mind; and the metaphysician's world of ultimate reality as it is reached by a still deeper process of reflection. These three worlds are not sharply divided off from, but they shade into, one another; and it is the same general mental process pro D gressively applied and made more and more thorough that carries us from one into the next. The plain man observes and reflects on his world of appearances in some degree; the scientist observes and reflects more carefully, and thus discovers his world of causes; and the metaphysician simply reflects more deeply and strenuously still in reaching his world of ultimate reality. The world of appearances must ever remain the world in which we live and work. The warp and woof of our experiences are woven of its phenomena. Our business is adjusted to it, our habits are framed to fit it, our language is saturated and colored with it, and our inmost thoughts are cast in its molds. Passing into the scientific world does not take us out of the practical world of appearances. We still speak and even think of the sun as rising and setting, though we know that this motion is an appearance. We still speak of solids, though we know that nothing is solid. So in passing into the metaphysician's world we still retain the habits of thought and speech that reflect the phenomenal world. We speak and think of things as being colored and resonant and sapid and odorous and as occupying space and moving in time, though we may believe that these qualities are subjective experiences of our own minds and do not belong to external things. The metaphysician's world is an attempt to conceive and construct in thought the world of ultimate reality, and such a construction does not take away or change the phenomenal world in which we live. We have thus endeavored to give some conception of the metaphysician's world, and we find it diverging into several forms. We are now to proceed to unfold the processes by which the metaphysician attempts to reach his world, and to indicate the grounds on which its several forms are founded. CHAPTER III THE SUBJECTIVITY OF SENSATION In this investigation it will be best to begin with the ordinary view of the world, and then subject it to examination to see whether it will stand without modification, or whether it must be reconstructed to meet the demands of our thought. This has been the history of philosophy. The scientist holds on to the plain man's view at as many points as he can, and recedes from it only as he is driven by logical pressure; and the metaphysician adheres to the scientist's view and yields only under the same compulsion to a deeper reconstruction. The ordinary view of the world pictures it as an external, extended, insensate reality, bright with light, sonorous, odorous, sapid, and hard. The average man thinks of these qualities as being in the material world and equally present whether a sentient mind is present to experience them or not; and we all habitually think of such a world, and in it we live and move and have our being. Will such a theory of the world stand? or must it be reconstructed? Let us start with the assumption of such a world, and then examine it from different points of view. I. THE PHYSICAL VIEW The physicist first examines this world, beginning at the outer end of the complex fact we call sensation. He investigates sound and finds it to consist in the external world of vibrations in the sonorous body which are communicated to the atmosphere and propagated through it to the drum or tympanum of the ear. In a similar way he finds light to consist of infinitely more rapid vibrations in an inconceivably finer atmosphere or medium, called ether, these enormously rapid pulsations striking against the retina of the eye somewhat as the pulsations of the air strike against the tympanum of the ear. Thus all that we find in the external world in the case of sound and light are vibrations of air and ether. These vibrations bear no resemblance to the sound and light we experience. We can only conceive them as being minute motions back and forth in tenuous media that are in themselves absolutely silent and dark. In the case of odor the scientist finds it is caused by a fine rain of particles thrown off by the odorous substance, which impinge on membranes of the nostrils. In taste, particles of the sapid substance act upon the papillæ of the tongue. As in the case of sound and light, these causes bear no resemblance to the sensations in the mind. In the sense of touch, the scientist finds that what we call hardness in an object is the energy of the atoms driving and holding them apart and resisting our attempt to force them together. We press against the object, |