Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/65

Rh It will doubtless be said that this is to come back by a detour to M. LeRoy's conclusion which a moment ago we seemed to reject: we are determinists voluntarily. And in fact all classification supposes the active intervention of the classifier. I agree that this may be maintained, but it seems to me that this detour will not have been useless and will have contributed to enlighten us a little.

I arrive at the question set by the title of this article: What is the objective value of science? And first what should we understand by objectivity?

What guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that this world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the communications that we have with other men, we receive from them ready-made reasonings; we know that these reasonings do not come from us and at the same time we recognize in them the work of reasonable beings like ourselves. And as these reasonings appear to fit the world of our sensations, we think we may infer that these reasonable beings have seen the same thing as we; thus it is we know we have not been dreaming.

Such, therefore, is the first condition of objectivity; what is objective must be common to many minds and consequently transmissible from one to the other, and as this transmission can only come about by that "discourse" which inspires so much distrust in M. LeRoy, we are even forced to conclude: no discourse, no objectivity.

The sensations of others will be for us a world eternally closed. We have no means of verifying that the sensation I call red is the same as that which my neighbor calls red.

Suppose that a cherry and a red poppy produce on me the sensation A and on him the sensation B and that, on the contrary, a leaf produces on me the sensation B and on him the sensation A. It is clear we shall never know anything about it; since I shall call red the sensation A, and green the sensation B, while he will call the first green and the second red. In compensation, what we shall be able to ascertain is that, for him as for me, the cherry and the red poppy produce the same sensation, since he gives the same name to the sensations he feels and I do the same.

Sensations are therefore intransmissible, or rather all that is pure quality in them is intransmissible and forever impenetrable. But it is not the same with relations between these sensations.

From this point of view, all that is objective is devoid of all quality and is only pure relation. Certes, I shall not go so far as to say that objectivity is only pure quantity (this would be to particularize too far the nature of the relations in question), but we understand