where they go beyond sense-data, are at no point in contradiction with sense-data, but, on the contrary, are ideally such as to render all sense-data calculable from a sufficient collection of data all belonging to a given period of time. Now physics has found it empirically possible to collect sense-data into series, each series being regarded as belonging to one “thing,” and behaving, with regard to the laws of physics, in a way in which series not belonging to one thing would in general not behave. If it is to be unambiguous whether two appearances belong to the same thing or not, there must be only one way of grouping appearances so that the resulting things obey the laws of physics. It would be very difficult to prove that this is the case, but for our present purposes we may let this point pass, and assume that there is only one way. We must include in our definition of a “thing” those of its aspects, if any, which are not observed. Thus we may lay down the following definition: Things are those series of aspects which obey the laws of physics. That such series exist is an empirical fact, which constitutes the verifiability of physics.
It may still be objected that the “matter” of physics is something other than series of sense-data. Sense-data, it may be said, belong to psychology and are, at any rate in some sense, subjective, whereas physics is quite independent of psychological considerations, and does not assume that its matter only exists when it is perceived.
To this objection there are two answers, both of some importance.
(a) We have been considering, in the above account, the question of the verifiability of physics. Now verifiability is by no means the same thing as truth; it is, in fact, something far more subjective and psychological. For a proposition to be verifiable, it is not enough that
