NATURE OF THE GROUNDWORK OF SCIENCE 311

which to speak most briefly are composed of things and

thoughts.

For all Idealists must regard, and do regard, the groups

of psychical modifications, which for them make up the

external world, as distinguishable from that reflex self-

consciousness which reflects upon its own mental experiences,

and apprehends knowledge and truth as knowledge and truth.

It is unquestionable, therefore, that things and thoughts con-

stitute, and must constitute, the matter of human science in

its widest acceptation of that term.

Such, then, being the field of labour wherein all pursuers

of science have to work, what are the tools which are

absolutely necessary for them that they may accomplish

their task ?

Now, obviously, the simplest and earliest used of these

tools are our various organs of sense, by the use of which

alone we can attain to sense-perceptions, which together

form the indispensable starting-point of all our knowledge,

and which supply us with materials necessary for the exercise

of the imagination, without the presence of which all in-

tellectual activity is impossible.

To these, of course, must be added all those common

those normal intellectual powers, the due exercise of which

constitutes a man a person of ordinary sound judgment and

good sense.

Amongst and bound up with these intellectual faculties,

however, are certain fundamental principles which constitute

our intellectual tools par excellence, and which here need

distinct recognition. We have seen in our fourth chapter

(" The Methods of Science ") how utterly impossible it is

not only to cultivate science, but even to make one valid

observation, or to usefully carry on the simplest experiment,

without the tacit assumption of certain fundamental principles

as convictions implicitly accepted. Such convictions were the

which to speak most briefly are composed of things and

thoughts.

For all Idealists must regard, and do regard, the groups

of psychical modifications, which for them make up the

external world, as distinguishable from that reflex self-

consciousness which reflects upon its own mental experiences,

and apprehends knowledge and truth as knowledge and truth.

It is unquestionable, therefore, that things and thoughts con-

stitute, and must constitute, the matter of human science in

its widest acceptation of that term.

Such, then, being the field of labour wherein all pursuers

of science have to work, what are the tools which are

absolutely necessary for them that they may accomplish

their task ?

Now, obviously, the simplest and earliest used of these

tools are our various organs of sense, by the use of which

alone we can attain to sense-perceptions, which together

form the indispensable starting-point of all our knowledge,

and which supply us with materials necessary for the exercise

of the imagination, without the presence of which all in-

tellectual activity is impossible.

To these, of course, must be added all those common

those normal intellectual powers, the due exercise of which

constitutes a man a person of ordinary sound judgment and

good sense.

Amongst and bound up with these intellectual faculties,

however, are certain fundamental principles which constitute

our intellectual tools par excellence, and which here need

distinct recognition. We have seen in our fourth chapter

(" The Methods of Science ") how utterly impossible it is

not only to cultivate science, but even to make one valid

observation, or to usefully carry on the simplest experiment,

without the tacit assumption of certain fundamental principles

as convictions implicitly accepted. Such convictions were the