Page:Russell - An outline of philosophy.pdf/140

128 but there is a long chain of intermediate causes in nerves and brain. If your finger were amputated you could still have the same experience by a suitable operation on the nerves that formerly connected the finger with the brain, so that the force between the finger-tip and the hard object, as a fact of experience, may exist when there is no finger tip. This shows that force, in this sense, cannot be what concerns physics.

As the above example illustrates, we do not, in fact, experience many things that we think we experience. This makes it necessary to ask, without too much assurance, in what sense physics can be based upon experience, and what must be the nature of its entities and its inferences if it is to make good its claim to be empirically grounded. We shall begin this inquiry in the next chapter.