“The Grammar of Science”

Abstract

MAY I, through your columns, point out to Prof. Pearson what seems to me a serious “antinomy,” to use his own phrase, in his “Grammar of Science.” The foundation of the whole book is the proposition that since we cannot directly apprehend anything but sense-impressions, therefore the things we commonly speak of as objective, or external to ourselves, and their variations, are nothing but groups of sense-impressions and sequences of such groups. But Prof. Pearson admits the existence of other consciousnesses than his own, not only by implication in addressing his book to them, but explicitly in many passages. He says (p. 59): “Another man's consciousness, however, can never, it is said, be directly perceived by sense-impression; I can only infer its existence from the apparent similarity of our nervous systems, from observing the same hesitation in his case as in my own between sense-impression and exertion, and from the similarity between his activities and my own.”