Professor Charles W. Morris, in his essay “Empiricism, Religion, and Democracy,” writes:
Imagine a community of men living on a cell in the blood stream of one of us, but so small that we have no evidence, direct or indirect, of their existence. Imagine further that they themselves are provided with scientific instruments of the type we use, and possess a method of science and a body of scientific knowledge comparable to ours. One of the bolder of these thinkers proposes that the universe they inhabit is a Great Man. Is this hypothesis admissible on scientific grounds or is it to be laughed down by the Minute Empiricists on the ground that it is “metaphysical”? We Macroscopic Empiricists would at least seem to have to favor the hypothesis! But then why at our own level cannot a similar hypothesis be raised: namely, that we are parts of a Great Man, the whole of our known universe being perhaps but a portion of the Great Blood Stream?…The liberal empiricist I have championed would side with the Minute Empiricists in asserting that the hypothesis is empirically meaningful since the properties ascribed to the Great Man would be properties drawn from objects that had been observed; he would merely say that in terms of evidence available to them this hypothesis was too poorly confirmed to have a place in their system of scientific knowledge.1
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