Appendix

SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT

A Portion of a Paper read to the Oxford Philosophical Society,
November 8, 1903, and reprinted, with some Revision, from the
Version given in Mind, vol. xiii. (N.S.), No. 51.

(See also Chapter I., Section 6, and Chapter X., Sections 1 and 2.)

It seems to me that I may most propitiously attempt to interest you
this evening by describing very briefly the particular metaphysical
and philosophical system in which I do my thinking, and more
particularly by setting out for your consideration one or two points
in which I seem to myself to differ most widely from current
accepted philosophy.

You must be prepared for things that will strike you as crude, for a
certain difference of accent and dialect that you may not like, and
you must be prepared too to hear what may strike you as the clumsy
statement of my ignorant rediscovery of things already beautifully
thought out and said. But in the end you may incline to forgive me
some of this first offence.... It is quite unavoidable that, in
setting out these intellectual foundations of mine, I should lapse
for a moment or so towards autobiography.

A convergence of circumstances led to my having my knowledge of
concrete things quite extensively developed before I came to
philosophical examination at all. I have heard someone say that a
savage or an animal is mentally a purely objective being, and in
that respect I was like a savage or an animal until I was well over
twenty. I was extremely unaware of the subjective or introverted
element in my being. I was a Positivist without knowing it. My early
education was a feeble one; it was one in which my private
observation, inquiry and experiment were far more important factors
than any instruction, or rather perhaps the instruction I received
was less even than what I learnt for myself, and it terminated at
thirteen. I had come into pretty intimate contact with the harder
realities of life, with hunger in various forms, and many base and
disagreeable necessities, before I was fifteen. About that age,
following the indication of certain theological and speculative
curiosities, I began to learn something of what I will call
deliberately and justly, Elementary Science--stuff I got out of
Cassell's Popular Educator and cheap text-books--and then, through
accidents and ambitions that do not matter in the least to us now, I
came to three years of illuminating and good scientific work. The
central fact of those three years was Huxley's course in Comparative
Anatomy at the school in Exhibition Road. About that as a nucleus I
arranged a spacious digest of facts. At the end of that time I had
acquired what I still think to be a fairly clear, and complete and
ordered