First and Last Things | Page 7

agate
paper-weight with the silver top that once was Henley's holds my loose memoranda
together. Outside is a patch of lawn and then a fringe of winter-bitten iris leaves and then
the sea, greatly wrinkled and astir under the south-west wind. There is a boat going out
which I think may be Jim Pain's, but of that I cannot be sure...
These are statements of a certain quality, a quality that extends through a huge universe
in which I find myself placed.
I try to recall how this world of fact arose in my mind. It began with a succession of
limited immediate scenes and of certain minutely perceived persons; I recall an
underground kitchen with a drawered table, a window looking up at a grating, a back

yard in which, growing out by a dustbin, was a grape-vine; a red-papered room with a
bookcase over my father's shop, the dusty aisles and fixtures, the regiments of
wine-glasses and tumblers, the rows of hanging mugs and jugs, the towering edifices of
jam-pots, the tea and dinner and toilet sets in that emporium, its brighter side of cricket
goods, of pads and balls and stumps. Out of the window one peeped at the more exterior
world, the High Street in front, the tailor's garden, the butcher's yard, the churchyard and
Bromley church tower behind; and one was taken upon expeditions to fields and open
places. This limited world was peopled with certain familiar presences, mother and father,
two brothers, the evasive but interesting cat, and by intermittent people of a livelier but
more transient interest, customers and callers.
Such was my opening world of fact, and each day it enlarged and widened and had more
things added to it. I had soon won my way to speech and was hearing of facts beyond my
visible world of fact. Presently I was at a Dame's school and learning to read.
From the centre of that little world as primary, as the initiatory material, my perception of
the world of fact widened and widened, by new sights and sounds, by reading and
hearing descriptions and histories, by guesses and inferences; my curiosity and interest,
my appetite for fact, grew by what it fed upon, I carried on my expansion of the world of
fact until it took me through the mineral and fossil galleries of the Natural History
Museum, through the geological drawers of the College of Science, through a year of
dissection and some weeks at the astronomical telescope. So I built up my conceptions of
a real world out of facts observed and out of inferences of a nature akin to fact, of a world
immense and enduring, receding interminably into space and time. In that I found myself
placed, a creature relatively infinitesimal, needing and struggling. It was clear to me, by a
hundred considerations, that I in my body upon this planet Earth, was the outcome of
countless generations of conflict and begetting, the creature of natural selection, the heir
of good and bad engendered in that struggle.
So my world of fact shaped itself. I find it altogether impossible to question or doubt that
world of fact. Particular facts one may question as facts. For instance, I think I see an
unseasonable yellow wallflower from my windows, but you may dispute that and show
that it is only a broken end of iris leaf accidentally lit to yellow. That is merely a
substitution of fact for fact. One may doubt whether one is perceiving or remembering or
telling facts clearly, but the persuasion that there are facts, independent of one's
interpretations and obdurate to one's will, remains invincible.
1.4. SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT.
At first I took the world of fact as being exactly as I perceived it. I believed my eyes.
Seeing was believing, I thought. Still more did I believe my reasoning. It was only slowly
that I began to suspect that the world of fact could be anything different from the clear
picture it made upon my mind.
I realised the inadequacy of the senses first. Into that I will not enter here. Any proper
text book of physiology or psychology will supply a number of instances of the habitual
deceptions of sight and touch and hearing. I came upon these things in my reading, in the

laboratory, with microscope or telescope, lived with them as constant difficulties. I will
only instance one trifling case of visual deception in order to lead to my next question.
One draws two lines strictly parallel; so
(two horizontal and parallel lines.)
Oblique to them one draws a series of lines; so
(a series of parallel and closely-spaced lines drawn through each horizontal line, one
series (top) sloping to the right, the other (bottom) to the left)
and instantly the parallelism