[30] The character of elements and the nature of simplicity have been discussed in the preceding section.
[31] Ibid., p. 275.
[32] Ibid., p. 275.
[33] This lack of continuity between the cognitive function of the nervous system and its other functions accounts for the strange paradox in the logic of neo-realism of an act of knowing which is "subjective" and yet is the act of so palpably an objective affair as a nervous system. The explanation is that the essence of all deprecated subjectivity is, as before pointed out, functional isolation. That this sort of subjectivity should be identified with the "psychical" is not strange, since a living organism is very difficult to isolate, while the term "psychical," in its metaphysical sense, seems to stand for little else than just this complete isolation. Having once appealed to the nervous system it seems incredible that the physiological continuity of its functions with each other and with its environment should not have suggested the logical corollary. Only the force of the prepossession of mathematical atomism in analytic logic can account for its failure to do so.
[34] But it would be better to use the term "logically-practical" instead of "subjective" with the psychical implications of that term.
[35] An analysis which has been many times carried out has made it clear that scientific data never do more than approximate the laws and entities upon which our science rests. It is equally evident that the forms of these laws and entities themselves shift in the reconstructions of incessant research, or where they seem most secure could consistently be changed, or at least could be fundamentally different were our psychological structure or even our conventions of thought different. I need only refer to the Science et Hypothèse of Poincaré and the Problems of Science of Enriques. The positivist who undertakes to carry the structure of the world back to the data of observation, and the uniformities appearing in the accepted hypotheses of growing sciences cannot maintain that we ever succeed in isolating data which must remain the same in the kaleidoscope of our research science; nor are we better served if we retreat to the ultimate elements of points and instants which our pure mathematics assumes and implicitly defines, and in connection with which it has worked out the modern theory of the number and continuous series, its statements of continuity and infinity.
[36] In other words, science assumes that every error is ex post facto explicable as a function of the real conditions under which it really arose. Hence, "consciousness," set over against Reality, was not its condition.
[37] C. Judson Herrick, "Some Reflections on the Origin and Significance of the Cerebral Cortex," Journal of Animal Behavior, Vol. III, pp. 228-233.
[38] Psychology, Vol. I, p. 256.
[39] H. C. Warren, Psychological Review, Vol. XXI, Page 93.