Now in his 89th year, Viscount Samuel, who with advancing age has had progressively to restrict the activities of his many-sided life, has reluctantly decided not to stand this year for election to the Presidency of The Royal Institute of Philosophy. It is but fitting, before he vacates the Presidential Chair in June, that PHILOSOPHY, as the official organ of the Institute, should pay a small tribute to one who has served its interests so devotedly, and whose claims on its gratitude cannot be exaggerated.

The problem I shall discuss is What reason have we for believing that there are physical objects? My purpose is not either to raise or to dispel doubts as to the existence of physical objects; this doubt constitutes a medical rather than a philosophical problem. The point of asking the question is that, while there can be no reasonable difference of opinion as to whether there are physical objects, there can be and is reasonable difference of opinion as to how the notion of a physical object is to be analysed; and if we are clear as to what grounds there are for believing in physical objects, we shall also be clearer as to what sort of physical objects we have grounds for believing in. Also, it is worth while to inquire which other beliefs are logically connected with, and which are logically independent of, the belief in physical objects.

The questions traditionally known as ontological have sometimes been summed up in the deceptively simple interrogative: “What is there?” But this formulation is notoriously misleading, because it suggests that we are already quite clear as to what “Being” is, i.e. as to what we mean when we say of something, that it exists. And this is not always so. Moreover, when we make statements like, “Time exists”, “redness exists”, it is almost never so. Statements of this kind, of course, are very uncommon. We could imagine a situation in which they could have a use, but only a rhetorical use. We would be hard put to say how to go about answering them or debating them.

MR. A is a liar. He repeatedly tells untruths, sometimes with malicious intent, sometimes for the purpose of dramatizing himself. Although he is perfectly aware of telling these untruths, he none the less ardently proclaims to himself and to others his complete honesty. In doing so it is no part of his intention to deny or to overlook the facts of the case. On the contrary he confesses his misdeeds with an embarrassing frankness. Mr. A's intention is to explain and to excuse these misdeeds. He says that each of his lies has been required by some accidental or unusual external circumstance, that his true inner self is in no way responsible for them and in no way affected by them. By nature, in his essence, he is absolutely honest.

This book would be very important indeed if Mr. Spencer Brown had substantiated his claims “that the concept of probability used in statistical science is meaningless in its own terms” (p. 66), and that confirming this is the only significance of experiments in psychical research. The six short (and not very relevant) introductory chapters need not be discussed here. It is in Chapters VII to IX that the author develops his thesis that the concept of randomness is self–contradictory, and the statistician's concept of probability consequently meaningless. I shall examine what I take to be the central argument leading to this conclusion. This is developed from a distinction between “primary chance or randomness” and “secondary chance or randomness” (“chance” and “randomness” are used interchangeably). The former concept is to be applicable only to individual events and is to depend upon their “unexpectedness or unpredictability”; the latter concept, applicable only to a series as such, is denned as “possessing no discernible pattern” (p. 46). The definition of “primary randomness” is amplified, but not clarified, on page 49: “An event is primarily random in so far as... one cannot be sure of its occurrence... The only relevant criterion is that we are able to guess”. (My italics. Notice that the former sentence implies unpredictability in the strong sense, i.e. not predictable with certainty, whereas the latter suggests unpredictability in a weak sense, i.e. not predictable as more or less likely. Spencer Brown oscillates between these different interpretations.) We are then told that primary randomness “admits of analysis in subjective terms”, since the same event may be predictable by one person but unpredictable by another; whereas secondary randomness is “a more objective concept”. (Is the author claiming that people vary less in their ability to discern patterns in a series than in their ability to predict its unobserved members? Or is he, as I suspect, arbitrarily interpreting “primary randomness” in terms of the speaker's ability to predict, and “secondary randomness” in terms of anyone's ability to discern?)