Let us suppose that the man in question takes up the study of botany.  Need he do anything very different from what is done more imperfectly by every intelligent man who interests himself in plants?  There in the real material world before him are the same plants that he observed somewhat carelessly before.  He must collect his information more systematically and must arrange it more critically, but his task is not so much to do something different as it is to do the same thing much better.

The same is evidently true of various other sciences, such as geology, zooelogy, physiology, sociology.  Some men have much accurate information regarding rocks, animals, the functions of the bodily organs, the development of a given form of society, and other things of the sort, and other men have but little; and yet it is usually not difficult for the man who knows much to make the man who knows little understand, at least, what he is talking about.  He is busying himself with things—­the same things that interest the plain man, and of which the plain man knows something.  He has collected information touching their properties, their changes, their relationships; but to him, as to his less scientific neighbor, they are the same things they always were,—­things that he has known from the days of childhood.

Perhaps it will be admitted that this is true of such sciences as those above indicated, but doubted whether it is true of all the sciences, even of all the sciences which are directly concerned with things of some sort.  For example, to the plain man the world of material things consists of things that can be seen and touched.  Many of these seem to fill space continuously.  They may be divided, but the parts into which they may be divided are conceived as fragments of the things, and as of the same general nature as the wholes of which they are parts.  Yet the chemist and the physicist tell us that these same extended things are not really continuous, as they seem to us to be, but consist of swarms of imperceptible atoms, in rapid motion, at considerable distances from one another in space, and grouped in various ways.

What has now become of the world of realities to which the plain man pinned his faith?  It has come to be looked upon as a world of appearances, of phenomena, of manifestations, under which the real things, themselves imperceptible, make their presence evident to our senses.  Is this new, real world the world of things in which the plain man finds himself, and in which he has felt so much at home?

A closer scrutiny reveals that the world of atoms and molecules into which the man of science resolves the system of material things is not, after all, so very different in kind from the world to which the plain man is accustomed.  He can understand without difficulty the language in which it is described to him, and he can readily see how a man may be led to assume its existence.