This is the world of touch and taste, of smell and hear and see. This then is the world that western science and much of western civilization is built upon. It is because of careful, disciplined attention to sensory data that we now ride cars rather than horses,that we are warm in the winter and cool in the summer, that our life expectancy is 70 years rather than 30. In a word, we owe alot of our material success to the minnows. Humanity is a evolving primate, a bio-chemical process, an assemblage of conditioning schedules signifying nothing.
Nature is an evolving system characterized by a struggle for existence.
And yet if we focus all of our attention on the minnows, there is a nagging suspicion that we might be missing something. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happines, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral chacter, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. Ideas like time, space, causality, substance, and quantity. As Bertrand Russell, Roger Jones and many others have pointed out, there are a host of such a priori ideas which are necessary for the doing of science.