Footnote zzz20

zzz20. Russell continues:

There is here, however, an important distinction to be made. There is, on the one hand, the question as to the sort of stuff the world is made of, and on the other hand, the question as to its causal skeleton. Science has been from its inception, though at first not exclusively, a form of what may be called power- thought : that is to say, it has been concerned to understand what causes the processes we observe rather than to analyse the ingredients of which they are composed. The highly abstract scheme of physics gives, it would seem, the causal skeleton of the world, while leaving out all the colour and variety and individuality of the things that compose the world. In suggesting that the causal skeleton supplied by physics is, in theory, adequate to give the causal laws governing the behaviour of human bodies, we are not suggesting that this bare abstrac tion tells us anything about the contents of human minds, or for that matter about the actual constitu tion of what we regard as matter. The billiard-balls of old-fashioned materialism were far too concrete and sensible to be admitted into the framework of

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