material, my perception of the world of fact widened and widened, by new
sights and sounds, by reading and hearing descriptions and histories, by
guesses and inferences; my curiosity and interest, my appetite for fact,
grew by what it fed upon, I carried on my expansion of the world of fact
until it took me through the mineral and fossil galleries of the Natural
History Museum, through the geological drawers of the College of
Science, through a year of dissection and some weeks at the astronomical
telescope. So I built up my conceptions of a real world out of facts
observed and out of inferences of a nature akin to fact, of a world
immense and enduring, receding interminably into space and time. In that
I found myself placed, a creature relatively infinitesimal, needing and
struggling. It was clear to me, by a hundred considerations, that I in
my body upon this planet Earth, was the outcome of countless generations
of conflict and begetting, the creature of natural selection, the heir
of good and bad engendered in that struggle.

So my world of fact shaped itself. I find it altogether impossible to
question or doubt that world of fact. Particular facts one may question
as facts. For instance, I think I see an unseasonable yellow wallflower
from my windows, but you may dispute that and show that it is only a
broken end of iris leaf accidentally lit to yellow. That is merely a
substitution of fact for fact. One may doubt whether one is perceiving
or remembering or telling facts clearly, but the persuasion that there
are facts, independent of one's interpretations and obdurate to one's
will, remains invincible.


1.4. SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT.

At first I took the world of fact as being exactly as I perceived it. I