Note 154 — Chapter XII

I hold, in spite of Berkeley's endeavours to reconcile his position with that of common sense, that the popular view does at least tend in this direction. That is to say, the every-day habit, when considering the external world, of abstracting from particular minds, leads on insensibly to that complete detachment of it from mind in general which expresses itself in the first stage of philosophic reflection, crude realism. The physicist appears to me, both from the first essays in Greek "nature-philosophy," as also from the not infrequent confusion even to-day between a perfectly safe "scientific materialism" and a highly questionable philosophic materialism, to share in this tendency to take separate consideration for separate existence. Each new stage of abstraction in physical science gives birth to a new attempt to find an independent reality, a thing-in-itself, hidden further away from sense.