 One of Cohen’s chief goals in Cohen 1898 is to show that recent work in electromagnetism undermines “sensualism” or “materialism”, and supports “idealism”, by transforming our conception of physical reality away from the “sensible” and “material” to the “ideal”. The physical world, according to the “sensible” conception of reality—the way the world appears to us to be through our senses—is composed of matter, conceived on the model of the roughly medium sized dry goods that our senses reveal to us. Physicists working in electromagnetism—Cohen points to Faraday especially—demonstrated the physical reality of electromagnetic fields. Following Faraday, Cohen applauds efforts to treat electromagnetic fields and forces as independent entities in their own right, not dependent on a “material” ether. Pure field theories thus vindicate idealism, by showing that our conception of the objects of physics should not be constrained by the picture of the world supplied by our senses; our conception of the world can only be supplied by thought, and not by the senses.