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Galileo and the Inquisition are only in error in the single affirmation in which they both agreed, namely that absolute position is a physical fact - the sun for Galileo and the earth for the Inquisition.
The thesis that will be advanced in this paper is that what have been considered rival beliefs are often in reality rival representations of the same belief. It may be said of one representation not that it is truer but that it is more convenient than the other. In particular it will be argued that the differences between the main conceptions of the world, theistic, mechanistic, and idealistic, are at least in part differences of this type, that is that they differ more in convenience than in truth.
It is usually assumed that at least we know what we mean when we assert that anything exists, but that we can doubt the