We hold that our concept of nature is a valid concept, the product of critical and unbiased observation. Translated into the language of Avenarius, this means that our E-values correspond to our R-values. We say about nature only what she says about herself. The E-values which express primitive animistic experience are certainly decidedly different in some respects from those E-values which express the experience of a Helmholtz or a Huxley. Yet they are alike in being all E-values. Whether justly or not, we do speak of an enlightened scientific experience and contrast it with one that is relatively superstitious, and the enlightened experience, as well as the other, has its roots in that primitive experience which we may suppose to have been absolutely imaginative and credulous.
But few of us are accomplished men of science. Not every one has moved so far from the starting-point. And yet we may say that there is a large group of minds that take what we may call the scientific point of view, whose experience does not include mythological objects. Other minds, those that make up the great majority in our own civilization, while not distinguished by very consciously scientific points of view, do yet have an experience, more resembling the experience of a scientific mind than that of the primitive animistic mind. Yet there still remain, Avenarius thinks, some traces of the original fund of animistic objects. The further development of this idea, the description and criticism of the remnant of animism, has for Avenarius a special polemical interest, which would lead us too far aside to follow up. What Avenarius would have us observe is that the evolution of experience is still in progress, and that what lies ahead must be a continuation of what lies behind. The progress thus far has been the development of that concept of nature which natural science has come to regard as the proper one, and the very general elimination of animism. The continuance of the same process should mean the complete elimination of animism, making the modern concept of nature wholly consistent and the complete acceptance of the world so defined as an object of experience.
All this history of experience can be made the matter of a psychological study which should seek to describe the process from a psychophysical point of view. This is what Avenarius has done.
The line of thought by which Avenarius himself approached this problem helps somewhat to throw light on the definition of the problem itself as Avenarius understood it. Avenarius has expressed great indebtedness to Mach,[1] and his approval of the latter's 'Principle of Economy.' Mach has stated this principle in the following terms: "Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts
- ↑ 'Kr. der R. Erf.,' Vol. I., p. xiii; Vol. II., p. 492.
