It will be seen that the mental and the physical are not necessarily mutually exclusive, although I know of no reason to suppose that they overlap.
The doubt as to the correctness of our definition of the "mental" is of little importance in our present discussion. For what I am concerned to maintain is that sense-data are physical, and this being granted it is a matter of indifference in our present inquiry whether or not they are also mental. Although I do not hold, with Mach and James and the "new realists," that the difference between the mental and the physical is merely one of arrangement, yet what I have to say in the present paper is compatible with their doctrine and might have been reached from their standpoint.
In discussions on sense-data, two questions are commonly confused, namely:
(1) Do sensible objects persist when we are not sensible of them? in other words, do sensibilia which are data at a certain time some times continue to exist at times when they are not data? And (2) are sense-data mental or physical?
I propose to assert that sense-data are physical, while yet maintaining that they probably never persist unchanged after ceasing to be data. The view that they do not persist is often thought, quite erroneously in my opinion, to imply that they are mental; and this has, I believe, been a potent source of confusion in regard to our present problem. If there were, as some have held, a logical impossibility in sense-data persisting after ceasing to be data, that certainly would tend to show that they were mental; but if, as I contend, their non-persistence is merely a probable inference from empirically ascertained causal laws, then it carries no such implication with it, and we are quite free to treat them as part of the subject-matter of physics.
