How do we account for the fact of the “ought” in human experience, where we all know what it is to feel pain (the “ought not”), have desires, will for one state over another, when none of these “oughts” are found in bare material fact? If the proposition “I ought to quit smoking” described a physical fact as blatantly physical as is “tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide” then there would be truths of “ought” everywhere--even in a world without life or consciousness. But as we said, the “ought” can only ever pertain to a psychology, and have its basis in there; an “ought” in a world without life makes as little sense as a sight in a world without minds.

Obviously all that is composed of the “ought”--pleasure and pain, things conducive to personal goals or not--these things speak to not facts of experience but qualities of experience. Many, many things in this world we can speak about and be understood without anything but a mutual recognition between us, where we match like words with like perceptions. We point to blue on a page and tell a child--“That is blue.” And the child sees what is blue, and can speak of the sky being blue, and all the others see the same; so we are all understood. Likewise with red and yellow and many other things--we point to an example and say, “That is red.” Then, thenceforth when the child sees red again, he points to the sunset and says, “It is red” and we all understand him, and one another, when anyone speaks of red. Likewise when the cigarette burns the edge of a finger, we say, “That is burn”--and we know what burn feels like and flee from it. A needle punctures the arm and we say, “It’s a pinch” or “It’s a pinprick.” And we all feel the sensation, learn that this is a “pinch” and we can speak to one another of these experiences, and we are all understood.

These things--colors, sensations of burn or pinch, a pitch of sound from a piano, and many aspects of our experience, are properly called qualities of experience and not facts of experience. Facts of experience deal with relations between objects, their relative quantities, positions, weights, concepts and so on. But not so with qualities of experience, like “blue”. We are only able to speak of “blue” and be understood because we have common biological mechanisms for sight, and thus the common word is applied commonly between us all. But how to communicate “blue” without this assumption of commonality between all our eyes and optic nerves? How to look at a blue sky, and in any way whatsoever, communicate what that sensation is, without simply pointing to say, “THAT is blue”? The only way we are able to speak with common words for common colors is the fact that we have a common biology that will give us all like sensations.

If it were not for this, how communicate to another--assuming he does not know it--what is blue? It is impossible, for instance, to let a man blind from birth know what is blue. Facts of experience you could teach him--you could tell him that light has wavelengths, that the moon goes from full-round to a crescent each month, that tides creep up the shore some distance daily to recede back down, that a given car weighs two tons--but you could never tell him what is blue, and he could never learn it.

This is because “blue”--as well as all those sensations containing pleasurable or painful reality, like burn, pinch, blow and so on--are qualities of sensation and not facts of sensation. The only way to know what is burn is to feel burn; the only way to know what is blue is to see blue; these are all qualities of what we sense, not facts in what is sensed. A man blind from birth could learn everything humankind knows of atomic and molecular structure, gravitation laws, laws of centrifugal force, magnetism and so on--but he could never learn “what is blue”.

And this is how, though all our daily experience be continually infused in value--sights being pleasurable or distasteful, states of mind being delightful or anguishing, physical sensations being blissful or torturous--this is how all our sensations are infused in value, while at the same time the cold intellect--which deals with facts of experience and not qualities of experience--calls all this value (the “ought”) “unreal” and “subjective illusion”. It is because pains and pleasures are qualities of experience and not facts of experience that the materialists end up calling all such value in experience the human illusion, when actually there is nothing more real to Man than the fact that he suffers and finds joy, and has a very real destiny of triumph or failure, in this world or some other. A pain, a burn, a state of depression--these are qualities of experience, like colors or a note from a piano, and thus far material explanations have had very little to say of such qualities, when they cannot be translated to fact without losing their overwhelming sense of “ought”. It is the quality of the burn from the stove that gives us that incredible “ought not” of pain; without that quality, all we have is a fact of injury, not the essence of agony; and this essence of agony is left behind if we only speak of the facts of experience, and leave out the qualities of experience.