Page:Our knowledge of the external world.djvu/98

 train coming, there is no very close causal connection between my two sense-data; but if I look at the moon on two nights a week apart, there is a very close causal connection between the two sense-data. The simplest, or at least the easiest, statement of the connection is obtained by imagining a “real” moon which goes on whether I look at it or not, providing a series of possible sense-data of which only those are actual which belong to moments when I choose to look at the moon.

But the degree of verification obtainable in this way is very small. It must be remembered that, at our present level of doubt, we are not at liberty to accept testimony. When we hear certain noises, which are those we should utter if we wished to express a certain thought, we assume that that thought, or one very like it, has been in another mind, and has given rise to the expression which we hear. If at the same time we see a body resembling our own, moving its lips as we move ours when we speak, we cannot resist the belief that it is alive, and that the feelings inside it continue when we are not looking at it. When we see our friend drop a weight upon his toe, and hear him say—what we should say in similar circumstances, the phenomena can no doubt be explained without assuming that he is anything but a series of shapes and noises seen and heard by us, but practically no man is so infected with philosophy as not to be quite certain that his friend has felt the same kind of pain as he himself would feel. We will consider the legitimacy of this belief presently; for the moment, I only wish to point out that it needs the same kind of justification as our belief that the moon exists when we do not see it, and that, without it, testimony heard or read is reduced to noises and shapes, and cannot be regarded as evidence of the facts which it reports. The verification of physics