George Stuart Fullerton

There are many subjects upon which, if we hold an opinion at all, we should hold it tentatively, waiting for more light, and retaining a willingness to be enlightened. Many a bitter and fruitless quarrel might be avoided, if more persons found it possible to maintain this philosophical attitude of mind. Philosophy is, after all, reflection, and the reflective man must realize that he is probably as liable to error as are other men. He is not infallible, nor has the limit of human knowledge been attained in his day and generation. He who realizes this will not assume that his neighbor is always wrong, and he will come to have that wide, conscientious tolerance, which is not indifference, but which is at the farthest remove from the zeal of mere bigotry.

Take psychology as an instance. How does it happen that the physicist calmly develops his doctrine without finding it necessary to make his bow to philosophy at all, while the psychologist is at pains to explain that his book is to treat psychology as "a natural science," and will avoid metaphysics as much as possible?

Appearances and realities are experiences which are observed to be related in certain ways. That which is not open to observation at all, that of which we have, and can have, no experience, we have no reason to call the reality of anything. We have, in truth, no reason to talk about it at all, for we know nothing whatever about it; and when we do talk about it, it is because we are laboring under a delusion.