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But the converse does not hold: namely, there is abundant perception of sense-objects unaccompanied by any perception of physical objects. This lack of reciprocity in the relations between sense-objects and physical objects is fatal to the scholastic natural philosophy. There is a great difference in the rôles of the situations of sense-objects and physical objects.
The ingression into nature of the delusive sense-object is conditioned by the adaptation of bodily events to the more normal occurrence, which is the ingression of the physical object. Physical objects are the ordinary objects which we perceive when our senses are not cheated, such as chairs, tables and trees. In a way physical objects have more insistent perceptive power than sense-objects.
Attention to the fact of their occurrence in nature is the first condition for the survival of complex living organisms. The result of this high perceptive power of physical objects is the scholastic philosophy of nature which looks on the sense-objects as mere attributes of the physical objects.
An artist will train himself to attend more particularly to sense-objects where the ordinary person attends normally to material objects. Thus if you were walking with an artist, when you said 'There's Cleopatra's Needle, perhaps he simultaneously exclaimed 'There's a nice bit of colour. Yet you were both expressing your recognition of different component characters of the same event.
These relations are just as much directly perceived, when we compare our various concepts, as the distance between two sense-objects is perceived when we look at it.
It is a law of nature that in general the situation of a sense-object is not only the situation of that sense-object for one definite percipient event, but is the situation of a variety of sense-objects for a variety of percipient events.
For example, for any one percipient event, the situation of a sense-object of sight is apt also to be the situations of sense-objects of sight, of touch, of smell, and of sound.
It is certain that they sometimes deceive us perhaps they do so always. Again, we dream every day of things which nowhere exist, and there is no certain criterion by which to distinguish our dreams from our waking moments, what guarantee have we, then, that we are not always dreaming? Therefore, our doubt must first of all be directed to the existence of sense-objects.
Accordingly when we know all about the physical object, we thereby know its component sense-objects. But a physical object is a condition for the occurrence of sense-objects other than those which are its components. For example, the atmosphere causes the events which are its situations to be active conditioning events in the transmission of sound.
Cognitively we thus live under a sort of rule of three: as our private concepts represent the sense-objects to which they lead us, these being public realities independent of the individual, so these sense-realities may, in turn, represent realities of a hypersensible order, electrons, mind- stuff. God, or what not, existing independently of all human thinkers.
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