“The mind has by its selective power fitted the processes of Nature into a frame of law of a pattern largely of its own choosing; and in the discovery of this system of law the mind may be regarded as regaining from Nature that which the mind has put into Nature.”
He declared that the significance of the world could not be
uncovered in science; instead, “we have to build the spiritual world
out of symbols taken from our own personality, as we build the scientific world out of the symbols of the mathematician.”
We have a task before us, according to Eddington: “We are
going to build a World—a physical world which will give a shadow
performance of the drama enacted in the world of experience.”The language of the “shadow performance,” here is so distinctively Eddington’s own that it is difficult not to take him at his word on
the dependence of the physical world on the human mind. However
that may be, there is a definite and distinctively nominalistic theme
in Eddington’s notions of world building and the selective influence
of mind. This nominalistic theme is intimately related to Edding-
ton’s epistemology and his theory of mind. They are worth some
examination in the present context.
The interpretation that is most natural here is that for Eddington, “the mind” selects particular systems of “relations and relata,” in the process of world building, so as to include particular laws of nature within the mathematical structure, so generated; and within the favored structure, the implicated laws are simply true by stipulation.
- See in particular, Bertrand Russell (1927), p. 226; and the discussion in Steven French (2003), p. 236.
- See Eddington (1920) “The Meaning of Matter and the Laws of Nature According to the Theory of Relativity,” Mind, 29, 114, p. 145: “…it is the mind which from the crude substratum constructs the familiar picture of a substantial world around us;” p. 153: “According to this view matter can scarcely be said to exist apart from mind.” See also Eddington, below, e.g., p. 327, “…the world-stuff behind the pointer readings [of physics] is of nature continuous with the mind;” and p. 274, “The realistic matter and fields of force of former physical theory are altogether irrelevant—except in so far as the mind-stuff has itself spun these imaginings.”
Eddington will also be found below to emphasize values and the
value of permanence in particular, in his arguments and in his
conception of the selectivity of mind. “The element of permanence
in the physical world,” he writes, “ … familiarly represented by the
conception of substance, is essentially a contribution of the mind to
the plan of building or selection.”
Arthur_S_Eddington_The_Nature_of_the_Physical_World_An_Annotated_Edition
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