For example, the assertion that there is green cheese in the moon cannot be a premiss in any deduction of scientific importance, unless indeed the presence of green cheese in the moon has been verified by experiment.

The current answer to these objections is that, though atoms are merely conceptual, yet they are an interesting and picturesque way of saying something else which is true of nature.

But surely if it is something else that you mean, for heaven's sake say it.

Do away with this elaborate machinery of a conceptual nature which consists of assertions about things which don't exist in order to convey truths about things which do exist.

I am maintaining the obvious position that scientific laws, if they are true, are statements about entities which we obtain knowledge of as being in nature; and that, if the entities to which the statements refer are not to be found in nature, the statements about them have no relevance to any purely natural occurrence.