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 CHAPTER VI

RECAPITULATION

permission to reproduce here a communication made by me in December 1904 to the Société Française de Philosophie. I there set forth briefly the ideas which I have just developed in this book. This succinct exposé may be useful as a recapitulation of the argument.

Description of Matter.—The physicists who are seeking for a conception of the inmost structure of matter in order to explain the very numerous phenomena they perceive, fancy they can connect them with other phenomena, less numerous, but of the same order. They thus consider matter in itself.

We psychologists add to matter something more, viz. the observer. We consider matter and define it by its relations to our modes of knowledge—that is to say, by bearing in mind that it is conditioned by our external perception. These are two different points of view.

In developing our own standpoint, we note that of the outer world we are acquainted with nothing