ABSTRACT
It is clear that if the search is for the harmonizing fact that marks the transition from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position (Poincaré, Science and Method, p. 30, and Braithwaite on causation), then much depends on the nature of the elements that are seen to be harmoniously coherent on the discovery of the harmonizing fact, and on the mental make-up of the investigator who discovers, or (according to Poincaré) selects the harmonizing fact. To a religious such a fact might well be quite different from that selected by a physicist. The fact or formula discovered by a mathematician would differ again. The reader of the works written by such pioneer discoverers would have an experience similar to the emotional experience of the discoverer; he would discover the discovery, or the book, or the sentence, or the phrase in which the selected fact was embodied. But—and here lies the central fact—in all these instances, as I have already shown, a series of facts out of an infinitely larger totality of facts is given coherence by the selected fact, and that is all; not only is the fact selected, but all the cohering facts also are a selection. Thus one fact is observed to ‘explain’ a great number of other facts, which facts may be considered to belong to the domain of Physics. But this is no more than saying that all the facts that are not given coherence by the selected or discovered fact are either unknown, ignored, or regarded as belonging to some other discipline or system. A result of this is that some kind of objective reality is attributed to the coherent system of facts, whereas there is no evidence to suppose that such a system, say physics, is anything more than an appearance artificially produced by the limitations of the human mind unable to do more than see a tiny fraction of the totality of facts, and prone to attribute to that fraction of facts a 27relationship intrinsic to itself, while the supposed relationship between the facts is only a relationship that each fact has to the capacities of the human observer.
