I try to recall how this world of fact arose in my mind.  It began with a succession of limited immediate scenes and of certain minutely perceived persons; I recall an underground kitchen with a drawered table, a window looking up at a grating, a back yard in which, growing out by a dustbin, was a grape-vine; a red-papered room with a bookcase over my father’s shop, the dusty aisles and fixtures, the regiments of wine-glasses and tumblers, the rows of hanging mugs and jugs, the towering edifices of jam-pots, the tea and dinner and toilet sets in that emporium, its brighter side of cricket goods, of pads and balls and stumps.  Out of the window one peeped at the more exterior world, the High Street in front, the tailor’s garden, the butcher’s yard, the churchyard and Bromley church tower behind; and one was taken upon expeditions to fields and open places.  This limited world was peopled with certain familiar presences, mother and father, two brothers, the evasive but interesting cat, and by intermittent people of a livelier but more transient interest, customers and callers.

Such was my opening world of fact, and each day it enlarged and widened and had more things added to it.  I had soon won my way to speech and was hearing of facts beyond my visible world of fact.  Presently I was at a Dame’s school and learning to read.

From the centre of that little world as primary, as the initiatory material, my perception of the world of fact widened and widened, by new sights and sounds, by reading and hearing descriptions and histories, by guesses and inferences; my curiosity and interest, my appetite for fact, grew by what it fed upon, I carried on my expansion of the world of fact until it took me through the mineral and fossil galleries of the Natural History Museum, through the geological drawers of the College of Science, through a year of dissection and some weeks at the astronomical telescope.  So I built up my conceptions of a real world out of facts observed and out of inferences of a nature akin to fact, of a world immense and enduring, receding interminably into space and time.  In that I found myself placed, a creature relatively infinitesimal, needing and struggling.  It was clear to me, by a hundred considerations, that I in my body upon this planet Earth, was the outcome of countless generations of conflict and begetting, the creature of natural selection, the heir of good and bad engendered in that struggle.

So my world of fact shaped itself.  I find it altogether impossible to question or doubt that world of fact.  Particular facts one may question as facts.  For instance, I think I see an unseasonable yellow wallflower from my windows, but you may dispute that and show that it is only a broken end of iris leaf accidentally lit to yellow.  That is merely a substitution of fact for fact.  One may doubt whether one is perceiving or remembering or telling facts clearly, but the persuasion that there are facts, independent of one’s interpretations and obdurate to one’s will, remains invincible.