ite minds to the divine mind.

But we are endeavouring in these lectures to limit ourselves to nature
itself and not to travel beyond entities which are disclosed in
sense-awareness.

Percipience in itself is taken for granted. We consider indeed
conditions for percipience, but only so far as those conditions are
among the disclosures of perception. We leave to metaphysics the
synthesis of the knower and the known. Some further explanation and
defence of this position is necessary, if the line of argument of these
lectures is to be comprehensible.

The immediate thesis for discussion is that any metaphysical
interpretation is an illegitimate importation into the philosophy of
natural science. By a metaphysical interpretation I mean any discussion
of the how (beyond nature) and of the why (beyond nature) of thought and
sense-awareness. In the philosophy of science we seek the general
notions which apply to nature, namely, to what we are aware of in
perception. It is the philosophy of the thing perceived, and it should
not be confused with the metaphysics of reality of which the scope
embraces both perceiver and perceived. No perplexity concerning the
object of knowledge can be solved by saying that there is a mind knowing
it[2].

[2] Cf. _Enquiry_, preface.

In other words, the ground taken is this: sense-awareness is an
awareness of something. What then is the general character of that
something of which we are aware? We do not ask about the percipient or
about the process, but about the perceived. I emphasise this point
because discussions on the philosophy of science are usually extremely
metaphysical--in my opinion, to the great detriment of the subject.

The recourse to metaphysics is like throwing a match into the powder
magazine. It blows up the whole arena. This is exactly what scientific
philosophers do when they are driven into a corner and convicted of
incoherence. They at once drag in the mind and talk of entities in the
mind or out of the mind as the case may be. For natural philosophy
everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick and choose. For us
the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the
molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the
phenomenon. It is for natural philosophy to analyse how these various
elements of nature are connected.

In making this demand I conceive myself as adopting our immediate
instinctive attitude towards perceptua