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CHAPTER XXVII

man's place in the universe

In this final chapter, I propose to recapitulate the main conclusions at which we have arrived, and then to say a few words on the subject of Man's relation to the universe in so far as philosophy has anything to teach on this subject without extraneous help.

Popular metaphysics divides the known world into mind and matter, and a human being into soul and body. Some—the materialists—have said that matter alone is real and mind is an illusion. Many—the idealists in the technical sense, or mentalists, as Dr. Broad more appropriately calls them—have taken the opposite view, that mind alone is real and matter is an illusion. The view which I have suggested is that both mind and matter are structures composed of a more primitive stuff which is neither mental nor material. This view, called "neutral monism", is suggested in Mach's Analysis of Sensations, developed in William James's Essays in Radical Empiricism, and advocated by John Dewey, as well as by Professor R. B. Perry and other American realists. The use of the word "neutral" in this way is due to Dr. H. M. Sheffer,[1] of Harvard, who is one of the ablest logicians of our time.

Since man is the instrument of his own knowledge, it is necessary to study him as an instrument before we can appraise the value of what our senses seem to tell us con cerning the world. In Part I. we studied man, within the framework of common-sense beliefs, just as we might study

  1. ↑ See Holt's Concept of Consciousness, preface.

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