Abstract

The form in which the metaphysical quality appears most definitely is in the character of matter that cannot be experienced itself and yet is regarded without question by the scientist as there. There is an illustration of a possible metaphysical inquiry, in a study of the matter and form of electrons. We can set up models of them but we know that no model we set up can have the character that the electrons themselves have; yet these electrons themselves are the conditions for the experience that we do have, and they can be presented to us in terms of that experience of which they are the condition. Such a field of investigation, as to their reality, their nature, would be a metaphysical field. It is a field of reality that cannot be brought inside of experience itself, because it is a condition of that experience, and yet it is a field which the experience itself implies. That would be, I presume, that which would appear in our own thought as the most evident example of a metaphysical discipline. Of course if it is approached from metaphysics as distinct from the physical standpoint, we are not distinguishing what the scientist is particularly interested in. He postulates something that is there, and is able to determine relations of uniformity, logical patterns, as appearing in that field, and he is liable to set up apparatus of the experiential type to occupy the field and to serve as relata. But he is not himself particularly interested in distinguishing what the matter of those relata is in itself. He is interested in relations, in laws of matter, in uniformities, in the mathematical functions that can be made use of for expressing those laws. These logical patterns are what he is seeking and he constructs the models which will enable him to grasp them. The metaphysical investigation would ask what the natures of these forms are that constitute the relata between which these relations obtain.