The scientist's mistrust of human intellectual effort tends to make him look longingly at the machine that can so often be made to appear the ideal recording instrument, a matter of rigid scales, pointers, unchanging weights, and so on. This attitude, which has something to commend it, yields matter for speculation if one considers it as betraying suspicion of anything that possesses life. How are we to find the truth, to gain knowledge, if facts can be recorded only by an object incapable of judgement or anything we regard as thought on the one hand, and on the other if thought is possible only by an object incapable of recording facts?

The difficulty may not be real in any significant way, but seems so because the method of formulation, in terms of knowledge, truth, and reality, leads to fallacious exaggeration of some elements of the problem, to the exclusion of others. Progress is less impeded if we consider ‘know’ to refer to a relationship, and reality and truth to refer to qualities of mental phenomena necessary to sustain mental health.