Abstract

The first of these two small works contains the text of the Riddell Memorial Lectures, while the second contains the text of the Twelfth Eddington Memorial Lecture. There is no doubt that Sir Russell Brain is on the side of the angels, at any rate in intention, in both these works. The professional philosopher will be slightly embarrassed however at the prospect of more and more scientists taking their stand with the angels for the wrong reasons. Both these works are concerned with the epistemological problem, and also therefore with the psychological problem, of perception. The first assumes that the sensory qualities of normal perception, such as colours, sounds, smells and touches, are generated by the brain of the percipient and are unlike those external events which constitute the states of objects by which they are caused. “The facts of physics and physiology show that perception is the end–result of a series of physical events, the last of which, a state of activity of the brain of the percipient, differs so completely from the events occurring in the object perceived that the qualitative features of a percept can have no resemblance to the physical object which it represents”. By Galileo out of Berkeley. Is leor nod don eolach!