Page:Our knowledge of the external world.djvu/99

 which is possible at our present level is, therefore, only that degree of verification which is possible by one man’s unaided observations, which will not carry us very far towards the establishment of a whole science.

Before proceeding further, let us summarise the argument so far as it has gone. The problem is: “Can the existence of anything other than our own hard data be inferred from these data?” It is a mistake to state the problem in the form: “Can we know of the existence of anything other than ourselves and our states?” or: “Can we know of the existence of anything independent of ourselves?” because of the extreme difficulty of defining “self” and “independent” precisely. The felt passivity of sensation is irrelevant, since, even if it proved anything, it could only prove that sensations are caused by sensible objects. The natural naïve belief is that things seen persist, when unseen, exactly or approximately as they appeared when seen; but this belief tends to be dispelled by the fact that what common sense regards as the appearance of one object changes with what common sense regards as changes in the point of view and in the intervening medium, including in the latter our own sense-organs and nerves and brain. This fact, as just stated, assumes, however, the common-sense world of stable objects which it professes to call in question; hence, before we can discover its precise bearing on our problem, we must find a way of stating it which does not involve any of the assumptions which it is designed to render doubtful. What we then find, as the bare outcome of experience, is that gradual changes in certain sense-data are correlated with gradual changes in certain others, or (in the case of bodily motions) with the other sense-data themselves.

The assumption that sensible objects persist after they