Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/401

 experience on which we have insisted. Primitive experience, mere existence of ordered data, does not presuppose a 'subject', or 'ego', or 'Me', or 'mind'; it can take place without any of the facts which lead to the formation of those concepts; it is not an experience of anybody. It is not difficult to imagine a universe without plants and animals and human bodies (including the body M), and without the mental phenomena just referred to: it would certainly be a 'world without minds' (for what else could deserve this name?), but the laws of nature might be exactly the same as in our actual world. We could describe this universe in terms of our actual experience (we would only have to leave out all terms referring to human bodies and emotions) ; and that is sufficient to speak of it as a world of possible experience.

The last considerations may serve as an example of one of the main theses of true positivism: that the naive representation of the world, as the man in the street sees it, is perfectly correct; and that the solution of the great philosophical issues consists in returning to this original world-view, after having shown that the troublesome problems arose only from an inadequate description of the world by means of a faulty language.