Physical reality

“ In addition, since thoughts are the product of energy patterns, and energy patterns are reality, it may also be possible that individuals encounter thought forms while in an out-of-body state which mingle with physical reality and are not easily differentiated. ”

“ We have acknowledged that the entities of physics can from their very nature form only a partial aspect of the reality. How are we to deal with the other part? It cannot be said that that other part concerns us less than the physical entities. Feelings, purpose, values, make up our consciousness as much as sense-impressions. We follow up the sense-impressions and find that they lead into an external world discussed by science; we follow up the other elements of our being and find that they lead—not into a world of space and time, but surely somewhere. ”

“ What appears to us as the physical order is, indeed, true Reality, and is, in fact, an integral part of the only Reality there is, but it appears to us in this special form and under these special restrictions because we have arbitrarily excluded every other aspect of the concrete facts from our purview by the choice of our initial postulates of descriptive science. By the nature of the special questions we put to our world, in our physical science, we determine in advance for ourselves the general character of the answer we are to receive. ”

“ As we have already learned, our recognition of the actuality of our own and our fellow-men’s life of unique and incommunicable feeling compelled us to admit the existence of much that, from its incommunicable nature, falls outside the sphere of physical reality. We have now to see how Psychology, in taking this non-physical existence as its subject-matter, conceives of its mode of existence and its relation to the subject-matter of the physical sciences. ”

“ When man analytically inspects the universe through the material endowments of his physical senses and associated mind perception, the cosmos appears to be mechanical and energy-material. Such a technique of studying reality consists in turning the universe inside out. ”

“ In the present Book we shall discuss some of the leading characteristics which everyday thought and scientific thought respectively assign to the physical order, and shall ask how these characteristics compare with those we have seen ground to ascribe to Reality, i.e. we shall attempt to form a theory of the place of physical existence in the whole system of Reality. ”

“ Of course, neither Thought nor Volition, as such, can be the absolute Reality. They, like Physical Force, are but transmutations, affections, phases of Reality. Nor, again, is Energy, as a quality, a correct description of the Absolute, as such. The Absolute, as such, we cannot describe; but in studying, as Physics does, the relations of physical phenomena and stating these in terms of Reality, it conveniently gives Reality a name appropriate to its own standpoint.
Metaphysics rightly declines to be required to study special branches of Science. ”

“ When however the physical realists — those I mean who regard the mechanical theory not as an abstract summary of Nature’s routine but as presenting fully-orbed reality — when these realists are called upon to explain the relation of this mechanism to mind they become involved in hopeless inconsistencies. ”

“ Direct perception of an outside reality is impossible.
[Pg 12]
Second-Hand Knowledge
Before you can become aware of any object there must first arise between it and your mind a chain of countless distinct physical events.
Modern science tells us that light is due to undulations or wave-like vibrations of the ether, sound to those of the air, etc. These vibrations are transmitted from one particle of ether or air to another, and so from the thing perceived to the body of man. ”

“ Accordingly, an independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation. ”

“ We will take first the world of physics, for, though the other world is given while the physical world is inferred, to us now the world of physics is the more familiar, the world of pure sense having become strange and difficult to rediscover. ”

“ Those modes of the Unknowable which we call motion, heat, light, chemical affinity, &c., are alike transformable into each other, and into those modes of the Unknowable which we distinguish as sensation, emotion, thought: these, in their turns, being directly or indirectly re-transformable into the original shapes. That no idea or feeling arises, save as a result of some physical force expended in producing it, is fast becoming a common place of science ”

“ Out of everything that the world brings to the totality of our senses, there remains nothing more than mere movements, with certain changes of rate, direction, and so on. The picture of the world received by such an observer is a purely kinematic one. And this is, indeed, the character of the world-picture of modern physical science. For in the scientific treatment of natural phenomena all the qualities brought to us by our other senses, such as colour, tone, warmth, density and even electricity and magnetism, are reduced to mere movement-changes. ”

“ Every motion which the accurate search of the experimentalist has traced, every principle or power which the physicist has discovered, every combination which the chemist has detected, every form which the naturalist has recorded, involves reflections of an exalting character, which constitute the elements of the highest poetry. The philosophy of physical science is a grand epic, the record of natural science a great didactic poem. ”

“ And the whole circle of the Physical Sciences, or Physical Science in its widest extent, confines itself to explaining the appearances of the material world by the properties of matter, and to reducing what is complex and manifold to the operation of a few simple but all-pervading laws. ”

“ The argument of the author is that we sensibly perceive an internal but physical world—physical objects of sense in the internal nervous system—from which we infer an external and physical world. This is "physical realism." ”

“ The world consists of colors, sounds, temperatures, pressures, spaces, times, and so forth, which now we shall not call sensations, nor phenomena, because in either term an arbitrary, one-sided theory is embodied, but simply elements. The fixing of the flux of these elements, whether mediately or immediately, is the real object of physical research. As long as, neglecting our own body, we employ ourselves with the interdependence of those groups of elements which, including men and animals, make up foreign bodies, we are physicists. ”

“ Now the state, including the shape or form, of a portion of matter, is the resultant of a number of forces, which represent or symbolise the manifestations of various kinds of energy; and it is obvious, accordingly, that a great part of physical science must be understood or taken for granted as the necessary preliminary to the discussion on which we are engaged. ”

“ We may not anticipate it, we may not even call it possible. But none the less are we bound to look to that day, and to labour for it as the crowning triumph of Science:—when Theoretical Mechanics shall be recognised as the key to every physical enigma, the chart for every traveller through the dark Infinite of Nature. ”

“ Many of the most eminent thinkers of the present time are disposed to regard all the active principles of nature as “modes of motion,”—to look upon light, heat, electricity, and even vital force, as phenomena resulting from “change of place” among the particles of matter; this change, disturbance, or motion, being dependent upon some undefined mover. ”

“ All the phenomena of life,—of the vis vitæ or vitality, are beyond human search. All the physical forces, or elements, we may examine by the test of experiment: but the principle on which sensation depends, the principle even upon which vegetable life depends, cannot be tested. Life is infinitely superior to every physical force ”

“ We are compelled to reserve our limited space for those branches of science which we are enabled to connect with the great natural operations constantly going on around us. Many of these more abstruse results will, however, receive some incidental notice when we come to examine the operation of the combined physical forces on matter. ”

“ According to the Pythagoreans and Platonists, there is a life infused throughout all things ... an intellectual and artificial fire—an inward principle, animal spirit, or natural life, producing or forming within, as art doth without—regulating, moderating, and reconciling the various motions, qualities, and parts of the mundane system. By virtue of this life, the great masses are held together in their ordinary courses, as well as the minutest particles governed in their natural motions, according to the several laws of attraction, gravity, electricity, magnetism, and the rest. ”

“ Do not the vegetation which covers our globe, the phenomena of life which we experience within us, and in the animals around us, require a continual motion of matter, an ebb and flow, so to speak, of action and reaction of bodies on each other, in reality or in appearance? Do not the phenomena of electricity, of magnetism, of galvanism, appear to be principles of great activity, the origin of motion wherever they exist, rather than objects indifferent to motion or rest? ”

“ In these studies of the effects which are continually presenting themselves to the observing eye, and of the phenomena of causes, as far as they are revealed by Science in its search of the physical earth, it will be shown that beneath the beautiful vesture of the external world there exists, like its quickening soul, a pervading power, assuming the most varied aspects, giving to the whole its life and loveliness, and linking every portion of this material mass in a common bond with some great universal principle beyond our knowledge. ”

“ Experience—that is to say, the self cum environment—comprises more than can be embraced in the physical world, restricted as it is to a complex of metrical symbols. The physical world is, we have seen, the answer to one definite and urgent problem arising in a survey of experience ”

“ Limiting, as much as possible, the view which opens upon the mind as we contemplate the adjustments by which this great machine, our system, is preserved in all its order and beauty, let us forget the great movement of the whole through space, and endeavour to consider the effect of those motions which are directly related to the earth, as a member of one small group of worlds. ”

“ Thus did the mind of man advance the first step toward the maturity of physical science, by attaining to a more comprehensive survey of the mundane system, and a more accurate knowledge of his own habitation, of this earthly planet. ”

“ The pure reason may be as sceptical as it pleases about the static solidity of what is popularly called "matter." It may use the term energy, or movement, or ether, or force, or electricity, or any other name to describe that permanent sensation of outward reality which our complex vision reveals. ”

“ But how “mechanical happening” comes to have this marvellous inwardness, which we call sensation, feeling, perception, thought and will, which is neither mechanical nor derivable from anything mechanical; and, further, how physical and psychical can condition one another without doing violence to the law of the conservation of the sum of energy, is an absolute riddle. ”

“ The position which I seek to establish in this essay is, that the various imponderable agencies, or the affections of matter which constitute the main objects of experimental physics, viz., heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, and motion, are all correlative, or have a reciprocal dependence;—that neither, taken abstractedly, can be said to be the essential or proximate cause of the others ”

“ On the other hand the tentative, hesitating, ambiguous hypotheses of Physical Science, transforming themselves afresh with every new discovery, seem, when the portentous mystery of Life's real secret confronts us, to be equally remote and elusive. ”

“ The influences of human thought on the physical forces which regulate the great phenomena of the universe,—and the operation of the powers of mind, on the material constituents of the planet, which is man's abiding place, form subjects for studies which have a most exalting tendency. ”

“ The power of physical methods applies for the establishment of that truth which can be realised directly through our senses, or through the vast expansion of the perceptive range by means of artificially created organs. ”

“ Hence any metaphysical problems about the nature of space and time are bound to affect our view of the nature of the physical order. Here, again, there is a point of at least possible contrast between the physical and the psychical. ”

“ It is only when physical "things" have been dissected into series of classes of particulars, as we have done, that the conflict between the point of view of physics and the point of view of psychology can be overcome. ”

“ We believe in the Conservation of the physical forces, in the Law of Evolution as it is at present and for a limited past time found to express the facts of nature, and in the fact of the Dissipation of Energy. All this we believe as the scientifically probable view, and we do so on the authority of certain students of physical science, who, having examined the facts, seem to agree upon so much as capable of popular exposition. ”