Page:Our knowledge of the external world.djvu/128

 thing will be one whose states at all times are ideal. Ideal appearances, states, and things, since they are calculated, must be functions of actual appearances, states, and things; in fact, ultimately, they must be functions of actual appearances. Thus it is unnecessary, for the enunciation of the laws of physics, to assign any reality to ideal elements: it is enough to accept them as logical constructions, provided we have means of knowing how to determine when they become actual. This, in fact, we have with some degree of approximation; the starry heaven, for instance, becomes actual whenever we choose to look at it. It is open to us to believe that the ideal elements exist, and there can be no reason for disbelieving this; but unless in virtue of some a priori law we cannot know it, for empirical knowledge is confined to what we actually observe.

(2) The three main conceptions of physics are space, time, and matter. Some of the problems raised by the conception of matter have been indicated in the above discussion of “things.” But space and time also raise difficult problems of much the same kind, namely, difficulties in reducing the haphazard untidy world of immediate sensation to the smooth orderly world of geometry and kinematics. Let us begin with the consideration of space.

People who have never read any psychology seldom realise how much mental labour has gone into the construction of the one all-embracing space into which all sensible objects are supposed to fit. Kant, who was unusually ignorant of psychology, described space as “an infinite given whole,” whereas a moment’s psychological reflection shows that a space which is infinite is not given, while a space which can be called given is not infinite. What the nature of “given” space really is, is a difficult