The Problems of Philosophy | Page 7

and our
private experiences.
In one sense it must be admitted that we can never prove the existence of things other
than ourselves and our experiences. No logical absurdity results from the hypothesis that
the world consists of myself and my thoughts and feelings and sensations, and that
everything else is mere fancy. In dreams a very complicated world may seem to be
present, and yet on waking we find it was a delusion; that is to say, we find that the
sense-data in the dream do not appear to have corresponded with such physical objects as
we should naturally infer from our sense-data. (It is true that, when the physical world is

assumed, it is possible to find physical causes for the sense-data in dreams: a door
banging, for instance, may cause us to dream of a naval engagement. But although, in this
case, there is a physical cause for the sense-data, there is not a physical object
corresponding to the sense-data in the way in which an actual naval battle would
correspond.) There is no logical impossibility in the supposition that the whole of life is a
dream, in which we ourselves create all the objects that come before us. But although this
is not logically impossible, there is no reason whatever to suppose that it is true; and it is,
in fact, a less simple hypothesis, viewed as a means of accounting for the facts of our
own life, than the common-sense hypothesis that there really are objects independent of
us, whose action on us causes our sensations.
The way in which simplicity comes in from supposing that there really are physical
objects is easily seen. If the cat appears at one moment in one part of the room, and at
another in another part, it is natural to suppose that it has moved from the one to the other,
passing over a series of intermediate positions. But if it is merely a set of sense-data, it
cannot have ever been in any place where I did not see it; thus we shall have to suppose
that it did not exist at all while I was not looking, but suddenly sprang into being in a new
place. If the cat exists whether I see it or not, we can understand from our own experience
how it gets hungry between one meal and the next; but if it does not exist when I am not
seeing it, it seems odd that appetite should grow during non-existence as fast as during
existence. And if the cat consists only of sense-data, it cannot be hungry, since no hunger
but my own can be a sense-datum to me. Thus the behaviour of the sense-data which
represent the cat to me, though it seems quite natural when regarded as an expression of
hunger, becomes utterly inexplicable when regarded as mere movements and changes of
patches of colour, which are as incapable of hunger as a triangle is of playing football.
But the difficulty in the case of the cat is nothing compared to the difficulty in the case of
human beings. When human beings speak--that is, when we hear certain noises which we
associate with ideas, and simultaneously see certain motions of lips and expressions of
face--it is very difficult to suppose that what we hear is not the expression of a thought, as
we know it would be if we emitted the same sounds. Of course similar things happen in
dreams, where we are mistaken as to the existence of other people. But dreams are more
or less suggested by what we call waking life, and are capable of being more or less
accounted for on scientific principles if we assume that there really is a physical world.
Thus every principle of simplicity urges us to adopt the natural view, that there really are
objects other than ourselves and our sense-data which have an existence not dependent
upon our perceiving them.
Of course it is not by argument that we originally come by our belief in an independent
external world. We find this belief ready in ourselves as soon as we begin to reflect: it is
what may be called an instinctive belief. We should never have been led to question this
belief but for the fact that, at any rate in the case of sight, it seems as if the sense-datum
itself were instinctively believed to be the independent object, whereas argument shows
that the object cannot be identical with the sense-datum. This discovery, however--which
is not at all paradoxical in the case of taste and smell and sound, and only slightly so in
the case of touch--leaves undiminished our instinctive belief that there are objects
corresponding to our sense-data. Since this belief does not lead to any difficulties, but on