ABSTRACT
The materialistic conception of the world is a necessary and useful fiction. The materialistic conception of the world is a necessary and useful fiction. but it is false it is taken for an hypothesis. Lange's contention, so frequently misunderstood because he seemed to be fighting against materialism and also to be in sympathy with it. The old truth already established by Democritus that the so-called secondary qualities are merely relative has been extended within recent times to the primary qualities also; but just as Goethe in his theory of colour speaks of colours as though they enjoyed objective existence. So materialism speaks of matter, substance and tangibility as though they were real things existing apart from our sensations exactly as they do when we are aware of them. The fine analytical sense of the English philosophers enabled them to trace the consequences of this separation in their most subtle psychological details.
