Philosophy : its scope and relations an introductory course of lectures / by Henry Sidgwick.
- Henry Sidgwick
- Date:
- 1902
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Philosophy : its scope and relations an introductory course of lectures / by Henry Sidgwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.
40/280 page 16
![of knowledge which leads men to philosophy will include the desire of knowing what can be known about this Reality : the question as to its fundamental nature and its relation [to Appearances] cannot then be excluded from the scope of Philosophy even if the question is to receive a negative answer. Indeed on this point I should appeal to Mr, Spencer’s practice against his formal definition : because, as I said, this is the main question that he is discussing in the first five chapters of his First Princii^les. On the other hand, to exclude the phenomena with which the Sciences are concerned from the scope of Philosophy, as some metaphysicians seem disposed to do, appears to pie no less unwarrantable. For such phenomena—however much we may contrast the phenomenal with the real in a narrow sense—must be admitted to be a part of the universe of fact, and therefore a part of Reality in a wide sense. This is true even of the appearances that we commonly regard as palpably unreal. Suppose a man tells me that he saw a ghost yesterday afternoon at 5, p,m, : however convinced I am that it was a mere subjective hallu- cination, the apparition is none the less a real fact in the history of the mental experience of my in- formant, And it is of course obvious that reafity of a sort must be held to belong to the world of colour and the world of sound which are in a manner common to normal human beings; and still more to the permanent material world about which Physical Science has sought and obtained knowledge. The question cannot be whether these so-called phenomena](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28064161_0040.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
