GEORGE H. MEAD

The scientist in the ancient world found his test of reality in the

evidence of the presence of the essence of the object. This evidence

came by way of observation, even to the Platonist. Plato could treat

this evidence as the awaking of memories of the ideal essence of the

object seen in a world beyond the heavens during a former stage of the

existence of the soul. In the language of Theatetus it was the agreement

of fluctuating sensual content with the thought-content imprinted in or

viewed by the soul. In Aristotle it is again the agreement of the

organized sensuous experience with the vision which the mind gets of the

essence of the object through the perceptual experience of a number of

instances. That which gives the stamp of reality is the coincidence of

the percept with a rational content which must in some sense be in the

mind to insure knowledge, as it must be in the cosmos to insure

existence, of the object. The relation of this test of reality to an

analytical method is evident. Our perceptual world is always more

crowded and confused than the ideal contents by which the reality of its

meaning is to be tested. The aim of the analysis varies with the

character of the science. In the case of Aristotle's theoretical

sciences, such as mathematics and metaphysics, where one proceeds by

demonstration from the given existences, analysis isolates such elements

as numbers, points, lines, surfaces, and solids, essences and essential

accidents. Aristotle approaches nature, however, as he approaches the

works of human art. Indeed, he speaks of nature as the artificer par

excellence. In the study of nature, then, as in the study of the

practical and productive arts, it is of the first importance that the

observer should have the idea--the final cause--as the means of

deciphering the nature of living forms. Here analysis proceeds to

isolate characters which are already present in forms whose functions

are assumed to be known. By analogy such identities as that of fish fins

with limbs of other vertebrates are assumed, and some very striking

anticipations of modern biological conceptions and discoveries are

reached. Aristotle recognizes that the theory of the nature of the form

or essence must be supported by observation of the actual individual.

What is lacking is any body of observation which has value apart from

some theory. He tests his theory by the observed individual which is

already an embodied theory, rather than by what we are wont to call the

facts. He refers to other observers to disagree with them. He does not

present their observations apart from their theories as material which

has existential value, independent for the time being of any hypothesis.

And it is consistent with this attitude that he never presents the

observations of others in support of his own doctrine. His analysis

within this field of biological observation does not bring him back to

what, in modern science, are the data, but to general characters which

make up the definition of the form. His induction involves a gathering

of individuals rather than of data. Thus analysis in the theoretical,

the natural, the practical, and the productive sciences, leads back to

universals. This is quite consistent with Aristotle's metaphysical

position that since the matter of natural objects has reality through

its realization in the form, whatever appears without such meaning can

be accounted for only as the expression of the resistance which matter

offers to this realization. This is the field of a blind necessity, not

that of a constructive science.

Continuous advance in science has been possible only when analysis of

the object of knowledge has supplied not elements of meanings as the

objects have been conceived but elements abstracted from those meanings.

That is, scientific advance implies a willingness to remain on terms of

tolerant acceptance of the reality of what cannot be stated in the

accepted doctrine of the time, but what must be stated in the form of

contradiction with these accepted doctrines. The domain of what is

usually connoted by the term facts or data belongs to the field lying

between the old doctrine and the new. This field is not inhabited by the

Aristotelian individual, for the individual is but the realization of

the form or universal essence. When the new theory has displaced the

old, the new individual appears in the place of its predecessor, but

during the period within which the old theory is being dislodged and the

new is arising, a consciously growing science finds itself occupied with

what is on the one hand the debris of the old and on the other the

building material of the new. Obviously, this must find its immediate

_raison d'etre_ in something other than the meaning that is gone or the

meaning that is not yet here. It is true that the barest facts do not

lack meaning, though a meaning which has been theirs in the past is

lost. The meaning, however, that is still theirs is confessedly

inadequate, otherwise there would be no scientific problem to be solved.

Thus, when older theories of the spread of infectious diseases lost

their validity because of instances where these explanations could not

be applied, the diagnoses and accounts which could still be given of the

cases of the sickness themselves were no explanation of the spread of

the infection. The facts of the spread of the infection could be brought

neither under a doctrine of contagion which was shattered by actual

events nor under a doctrine of the germ theory of disease, which was as

yet unborn. The logical import of the dependence of these facts upon

observation, and hence upon the individual experience of the scientist,

I shall have occasion to discuss later; what I am referring to here is

that the conscious growth of science is accompanied by the appearance of

this sort of material.

There were two fields of ancient science, those of mathematics and of

astronomy, within which very considerable advance was achieved, a fact

which would seem therefore to offer exception to the statement just

made. The theory of the growth of mathematics is a disputed territory,

but whether mathematical discovery and invention take place by steps

which can be identified with those which mark the advance in the

experimental sciences or not, the individual processes in which the

discoveries and inventions have arisen are almost uniformly lost to view

in the demonstration which presents the results. It would be improper to

state that no new data have arisen in the development of mathematics, in

the face of such innovations as the minus quantity, the irrational, the

imaginary, the infinitesimal, or the transfinite number, and yet the

innovations appear as the recasting of the mathematical theories rather

than as new facts. It is of course true that these advances have

depended upon problems such as those which in the researches of Kepler

and Galileo led to the early concepts of the infinitesimal procedure,

and upon such undertakings as bringing the combined theories of geometry

and algebra to bear upon the experiences of continuous change. For a

century after the formulation of the infinitesimal method men were

occupied in carrying the new tool of analysis into every field where its

use promised advance. The conceptions of the method were uncritical. Its

applications were the center of attention. The next century undertook to

bring order into the concepts, consistency into the doctrine, and rigor

into the reasoning. The dominating trend of this movement was logical

rather than methodological. The development was in the interest of the

foundations of mathematics rather than in the use of mathematics as a

method for solving scientific problems. Of course this has in no way

interfered with the freedom of application of mathematical technique to

the problems of physical science. On the contrary, it was on account of

the richness and variety of the contents which the use of mathematical

methods in the physical sciences imported into the doctrine that this

logical housecleaning became necessary in mathematics. The movement has

been not only logical as distinguished from methodological but logical

as distinguished from metaphysical as well. It has abandoned a Euclidean

space with its axioms as a metaphysical presupposition, and it has

abandoned an Aristotelian subsumptive logic for which definition is a

necessary presupposition. It recognizes that everything cannot be

proved, but it does not undertake to state what the axiomata shall be;

and it also recognizes that not everything can be defined, and does not

undertake to determine what shall be defined implicitly and what

explicitly. Its constants are logical constants, as the proposition, the

class and the relation. With these and their like and with relatively

few primitive ideas, which are represented by symbols, and used

according to certain given postulates, it becomes possible to bring the

whole body of mathematics within a single treatment. The development of

this pure mathematics, which comes to be a logic of the mathematical

sciences, has been made possible by such a generalization of number

theory and theories of the elements of space and time that the rigor of

mathematical reasoning is secured, while the physical scientist is left

the widest freedom in the choice and construction of concepts and

imagery for his hypotheses. The only compulsion is a logical compulsion.

The metaphysical compulsion has disappeared from mathematics and the

sciences whose techniques it provides.

It was just this compulsion which confined ancient science. Euclidian

geometry defined the limits of mathematics. Even mechanics was

cultivated largely as a geometrical field. The metaphysical doctrine

according to which physical objects had their own places and their own

motions determined the limits within which astronomical speculations

could be carried on. Within these limits Greek mathematical genius

achieved marvelous results. The achievements of any period will be

limited by two variables: the type of problem against which science

formulates its methods, and the materials which analysis puts at the

scientist's disposal in attacking the problems. The technical problems

of the trisection of an angle and the duplication of a cube are

illustrations of the problems which characterize a geometrical doctrine

that was finding its technique. There appears also the method of

analysis of the problem into simpler problems, the assumption of the

truth of the conclusion to be proved and the process of arguing from

this to a known truth. The more fundamental problem which appears first

as the squaring of the circle, which becomes that of the determination

of the relation of the circle to its diameter and development of the

method of exhaustion, leads up to the sphere, the regular polyhedra, to

conic sections and the beginnings of trigonometry. Number was not freed

from the relations of geometrical magnitudes, though Archimedes could

conceive of a number greater or smaller than any assignable magnitude.

With the method of exhaustion, with the conceptions of number found in

writings of Archimedes and others, with the beginnings of spherical

geometry and trigonometry, and with the slow growth of algebra finding

its highest expression in that last flaring up of Greek mathematical

creation, the work of Diophantes; there were present all the conceptions

which were necessary for attack upon the problems of velocities and

changing velocities, and the development of the method of analysis which

has been the revolutionary tool of Europe since the Renaissance. But the

problems of a relation between the time and space of a motion that

should change just as a motion, without reference to the essence of the

object in motion, were problems which did not, perhaps could not, arise

to confront the Greek mind. In any case its mathematics was firmly

embedded in a Euclidian space. Though there are indications of some

distrust, even in Greek times, of the parallel axiom, the suggestion

that mathematical reasoning could be made rigorous and comprehensive

independently of the specific content of axiom and definition was an

impossible one for the Greek, because such a suggestion could be made

only on the presupposition of a number theory and an algebra capable of

stating a continuum in terms which are independent of the sensuous

intuition of space and time and of the motion that takes place within

space and time. In the same fashion mechanics came back to fundamental

generalizations of experience with reference to motions which served as

axioms of mechanics, both celestial and terrestrial: the assumptions of

the natural motion of earthly substances to their own places in

straight lines, and of celestial bodies in circles and uniform

velocities, of an equilibrium where equal weights operate at equal

distances from the fulcrum.

The incommensurable of Pythagoras and the paradoxes of Zeno present the

"no thoroughfares" of ancient mathematical thought. Neither the

continuum of space nor of motion could be broken up into ultimate units,

when incommensurable ratios existed which could not be expressed, and

when motion refused to be divided into positions of space or time since

these are functions of motion. It was not until an algebraic theory of

number led mathematicians to the use of expressions for the irrational,

the minus, and the imaginary numbers through the logical development of

generalized expressions, that problems could be formulated in which

these irrational ratios and quantities were involved, though it is also

true that the effort to deal with problems of this character was in no

small degree responsible for the development of the algebra. Fixed

metaphysical assumptions in regard to number, space, time, motion, and

the nature of physical objects determined the limits within which

scientific investigation could take place. Thus though the hypothesis of

Copernicus and in all probability of Tycho Brahe were formulated by

Greek astronomers, their physical doctrine was unable to use them

because they were in flagrant contradiction with the definitions the

ancient world gave to earthly and celestial bodies and their natural

motions. The atomic doctrine with Democritus' thoroughgoing undertaking

to substitute a quantitative for a qualitative conception of matter

with the location of the qualitative aspects of the world in the

experience of the soul appealed only to the Epicurean who used the

theory as an exorcism to drive out of the universe the spirits which

disturbed the calm of the philosopher.

There was only one field in which ancient science seemed to break away

from the fixed assumptions of its metaphysics and from the definitions

of natural objects which were the bases for their scientific inferences,

this was the field of astronomy in the period after Eudoxus. Up to and

including the theories of Eudoxus, physical and mathematical astronomy

went hand in hand. Eudoxus' nests of spheres within spheres hung on

different axes revolving in different uniform periods was the last

attempt of the mathematician philosopher to state the anomalies of the

heavens, and to account for the stations, the retrogressions, and

varying velocities of planetary bodies by a theory resolving all

phenomena of these bodies into motions of uniform velocities in perfect

circles, and also placing these phenomena within a physical theory

consistent with the prevailing conceptions of the science and philosophy

of the time. As a physicist Aristotle felt the necessity of introducing

further spheres between the nests of spheres assigned by Eudoxus to the

planetary bodies, spheres whose peculiar motions should correct the

tendency of the different groups of spheres to pass their motions on to

each other. Since the form of the orbits of heavenly bodies and their

velocities could not be considered to be the results of their masses and

of their relative positions with reference to one another; since it was

not possible to calculate the velocities and orbits from the physical

characters of the bodies, since in a word these physical characters did

not enter into the problem of calculating the positions of the bodies

nor offer explanations for the anomalies which the mathematical

astronomer had to explain, it was not strange that he disinterested

himself from the metaphysical celestial mechanics of his time and

concentrated his attention upon the geometrical hypotheses by means of

which he could hope to resolve into uniform revolutions in circular

orbits the anomalous motions of the planetary bodies. The introduction

of the epicycle with the deferent and the eccentric as working

hypotheses to solve the anomalies of the heavens is to be comprehended

largely in view of the isolation of the mathematical as distinguished

from the physical problem of astronomy. In no sense were these

conceptions working hypotheses of a celestial mechanics. They were the

only means of an age whose mathematics was almost entirely geometrical

for accomplishing what a later generation could accomplish by an

algebraic theory of functions. As has been pointed out, the undertaking

of the ancient mathematical astronomer to resolve the motions of

planetary bodies into circular, uniform, continuous, symmetrical

movements is comparable to the theorem of Fourier which allows the

mathematician to replace any one periodic function by a sum of circular

functions. In other words, the astronomy of the Alexandrian period is a

somewhat cumbrous development of the mathematical technique of the time

to enable the astronomer to bring the anomalies of the planetary bodies,

as they increased under observation, within the axioms of a metaphysical

physics. The genius exhibited in the development of the mathematical

technique places the names of Apollonius of Perga, Hipparchus of Nicaea,

and Ptolemy among the great mathematicians of the world, but they never

felt themselves free to attack by their hypotheses the fundamental

assumptions of the ancient metaphysical doctrine of the universe. Thus

it was said of Hipparchus by Adrastus, a philosopher of the first

century A. D., in explaining his preference for the epicycle to the

eccentric as a means of analyzing the motions of the planetary bodies:

"He preferred and adopted the principle of the epicycle as more probable

to his mind, because it ordered the system of the heavens with more

symmetry and with a more intimate dependence with reference to the

center of the universe. Although he guarded himself from assuming the

role of the physicist in devoting himself to the investigations of the

real movements of the stars, and in undertaking to distinguish between

the motions which nature has adopted from those which the appearances

present to our eyes, he assumed that every planet revolved along an

epicycle, the center of which describes a circumference concentric with

the earth." Even mathematical astronomy does not offer an exception to

the scientific method of the ancient world, that of bringing to

consciousness the concepts involved in their world of experience,

organizing these concepts with reference to each, analyzing and

restating them within the limits of their essential accidents, and

assimilating the concrete objects of experience to these typical forms

as more or less complete realizations.

At the beginning of the process of Greek self-conscious reflection and

analysis, the mind ran riot among the concepts and their characters

until the contradictions which arose from these unsystematized

speculations brought the Greek mind up to the problems of criticism and

scientific method. Criticism led to the separation of the many from the

one, the imperfect copy from the perfect type, the sensuous and

passionate from the rational and the intrinsically good, the impermanent

particular from the incorruptible universal. The line of demarcation ran

between the lasting reality that answered to critical objective thought

and the realm of perishing imperfect instances, of partially realized

forms full of unmeaning differences due to distortion and imperfection,

the realm answering to a sensuous passionate unreflective experience. It

would be a quite inexcusable mistake to put all that falls on the wrong

side of the line into a subjective experience, for these characters

belonged not alone to the experience, but also to the passing show, to

the world of imperfectly developed matter which belonged to the

perceptual passionate experience. While it may not then be classed as

subjective, the Greeks of the Sophistic period felt that this phase of

existence was an experience which belongs to the man in his individual

life, that life in which he revolts from the conventions of society, in

which he questions accepted doctrine, in which he differentiates himself

from his fellows. Protagoras seems even to have undertaken to make this

experience of the individual, the stuff of the known world. It is

difficult adequately to assess Protagoras' undertaking. He seems to be

insisting both that the man's experience as his own must be the measure

of reality as known and on the other hand that these experiences present

norms which offer a choice in conduct. If this is true Protagoras

conceived of the individual's experience in its atypical and

revolutionary form as not only real but the possible source of fuller

realities than the world of convention. The undertaking failed both in

philosophic doctrine and in practical politics. It failed in both fields

because the subjectivist, both in theory and practice, did not succeed

in finding a place for the universal character of the object, its

meaning, in the mind of the individual and thus in finding in this

experience the hypothesis for the reconstruction of the real world. In

the ancient world the atypical individual, the revolutionist, the

non-conformist was a self-seeking adventurer or an anarchist, not an

innovator or reformer, and subjectivism in ancient philosophy remained a

skeptical attitude which could destroy but could not build up.

Hippocrates and his school came nearer consciously using the experience

of the individual as the actual material of the object of knowledge. In

the skeptical period in which they flourished they rejected on the one

hand the magic of traditional medicine and on the other the empty

theorizing that had been called out among the physicians by the

philosophers. Their practical tasks held them to immediate experience.

Their functions in the gymnasia gave their medicine an interest in

health as well as in disease, and directed their attention largely

toward diet, exercise, and climate in the treatment even of disease. In

its study they have left the most admirable sets of observations,

including even accounts of acknowledged errors and the results of

different treatments of cases, which ancient science can present. It was

the misfortune of their science that it dealt with a complicated

subject-matter dependent for its successful treatment upon the whole

body of physical, chemical, and biological disciplines as well as the

discovery and invention of complicated techniques. They were forced

after all to adopt a hopelessly inadequate physiological theory--that of

the four humors--with the corresponding doctrine of health and disease

as the proper and improper mixture of these fluids. Their marvelously

fine observation of symptoms led only to the definition of types and a

medical practice which was capable of no consistent progress outside of

certain fields of surgery. Thus even Greek medicine was unable to

develop a different type of scientific method except in so far as it

kept alive an empiricism which played a not unimportant part in

post-Aristotelian philosophy. Within the field of astronomy in

explaining the anomalies of the heavens involved in their metaphysical

assumptions, they built up a marvelously perfect Euclidian geometry, for

here refined and exhaustive definition of all the elements was possible.

The problems involved in propositions to be proved appeared in the

individual experience of the geometrician, but this experience in space

was uniform with that of every one else and took on a universal not an

individual form. The test of the solution was given in a demonstration

which holds for every one living in the same Euclidian space. When the

mathematician found himself carried by his mathematical technique beyond

the assumptions of a metaphysical physics he abandoned the field of

physical astronomy and confined himself to the development of his

mathematical expressions.

In other fields Greek science analyzed with varying success and critical

skill only the conceptions found in the experience of their time and

world. Nor did Greek thought succeed in formulating any adequate method

by which the ultimate concepts in any field of science were to be

determined. It is in Aristotle's statement of induction and the process

of definition that we appreciate most clearly the inadequacy of their

method. This inadequacy lies fundamentally in Aristotle's conception of

observation which, as I have already noted, implies the recognition of

an individual, that is, an object which is an embodied form or idea. The

function of knowledge is to bring out this essence. The mind sees

through the individuals the universal nature. The value of the

observation lies, then, not in the controlled perception of certain data

as observed facts, but in the insight with which he recognizes the

nature of the object. When this nature has been seen it is to be

analyzed into essential characters and thus formulated into the

definition. In Aristotle's methodology there is no procedure by which

the mind can deliberately question the experience of the community and

by a controlled method reconstruct its received world. Thus the natural

sciences were as really fixed by the conceptions of the community as

were the exact sciences by the conceptions of a Euclidian geometry and

the mathematics which the Greeks formulated within it. The individual

within whose peculiar experience arises a contradiction to the

prevailing conceptions of the community and in whose creative

intelligence appears the new hypothesis which makes possible a new

heaven and a new earth could utilize his individual experience only in

destructive skepticism. Subjectivism served in ancient thought to

invalidate knowledge not to enlarge it.

Zeller has sketched a parallelism between the ideal state of Plato and

the social structure of the medieval world. The philosopher-king is

represented by the Pope, below him answering to the warrior class in the

Platonic state stands the warrior class of the Holy Roman Empire, who in

theory enforce the dictates of the Roman curia, while at the bottom in

both communities stand the mass of the people bound to obedience to the

powers above. There is, however, one profound difference between the

two, and that is to be found in the relative positions of the ideal

worlds that dominate each. Plato's ideal world beyond the heavens gives

what reality it has to this through the participation by the world of

becoming in the ideas. Opinion dimly sensed the ideas in the evanescent

objects about it, and though Plato's memory theory of knowledge assumed

that the ideas had been seen in former existence and men could thus

recognize the copies here, the ideal world was not within the mind but

without. In a real sense the Kingdom of Heaven was within men in the

medieval world, as was the Holy Roman Empire. They were ideal

communities that ought to exist on earth, and it was due to the

depravity of men that they did not exist. From time to time men

undertook in various upheavals to realize in some part these spiritual

and political ideals which they carried within them. And men not only

carried within them the ideas of a New Jerusalem in which the interest

of one was the interest of all and of an earthly state ordered by a

divine decree to fulfil this Christian ideal, but the determining causes

of the present condition and the future realization depended also upon

the inner attitudes and experiences of the individuals themselves.

Without carrying the analogy here too far, this relation between the

experience of the individual and the world which may arise through the

realization of his ideas is the basis of the most profound distinction

between the ancient world and the modern. Before the logic of this

attitude could appear in science a long period of intellectual and

social growth was necessary. The most essential part of this growth was

the slow but steady development of psychological doctrine which placed

the objective world in the experience of the individual. It is not of

interest here to bring out the modern epistemological problem that grew

out of this, or to present this in the world of Leibnitzian monads that

had no windows or in the Berkeleyan subjective idealism. What is of

interest is to point out that this attitude established a functional

relationship between even the subjective experience of the individual

and the object of knowledge. A skepticism based upon subjectivism might

thereafter question the justification of the reference of experience

beyond itself; it could not question knowledge and its immediate object.

Kant formalizes the relation of what was subjective and what was

objective by identifying the former with the sensuous content of

experience and the latter with the application of the forms of

sensibility and understanding to this content. The relationship was

formal and dead. Kant recognized no functional relationship between the

nature of the _Mannigfaltigkeit_ of sensuous experience and the forms

into which it was poured. The forms remained external to the content,

but the relationship was one which existed within experience, not

without it, and within this experience could be found the necessity and

universality which had been located in the world independent of

experience. The melting of these fixed Kantian categories came with the

spring floods of the romantic idealism that followed Kant.

The starting-point of this idealism was Kantian. Within experience lay

the object of knowledge. The Idealist's principal undertaking was to

overcome the skepticism that attached to the object of knowledge because

of its reference to what lies outside itself. If, as Kant had undertaken

to prove, the reality which knowledge implies must reach beyond

experience, then, on the Kantian doctrine that knowledge lies within

experience, knowledge itself is infected with skepticism. Kant's

practical bridge from the world of experience to the world of

things-in-themselves, which he walked by faith and not by sight, was

found in the postulates of the conduct of the self as a moral being, as

a personality. The romantic idealists advance by the same road, though

as romanticists not critical philosophers, they fashioned the world of

reality, that transcends experience, out of experience itself, by

centering the self in the absolute self and conceiving the whole

infinite universe as the experience of the absolute self. The

interesting phase of this development is that the form which experience

takes in becoming objective is found in the nature and thought of the

individual, and that this process of epistemological experience becomes

thus a process of nature, if the objective is the natural. In Kant's

terms our minds give laws to nature. But this nature constantly exhibits

its dependence upon underlying noumena that must therefore transcend the

laws given by the understanding. The Romanticist insists that this other

reality must be the same stuff as that of experience, that in experience

arise forms which transcend those which bound the experience in its

earlier phase. If in experience the forms of the objective world are

themselves involved, the process of knowledge sets no limits to itself,

which it may not, does not, by implication transcend. As further

indication of the shift by which thought had passed into possession of

the world of things in themselves stands the antinomy which in Kantian

experience marks the limit of our knowledge while in post-Kantian

idealism it becomes the antithesis that leads to the synthesis upon the

higher plane. Contradiction marks the phase at which the spirit becomes

creative, not simply giving an empty formal law to nature, but creating

the concrete universe in which content and form merge in true actuality.

The relation of the sensuous content to the conceptual form is not dead,

as in Kant's doctrine. It is fused as perception into concept and

carries its immediacy and concreteness of detail into the concrete

universal as the complete organization of stimulation and response pass

into the flexible habit. And yet in the Hegelian logic, the movement is

always away from the perceptual experience toward the higher realm of

the _Idee_. Thought is creative in the movement, but in its ultimate

reality it transcends spatial and temporal experience, the experience

with which the natural and mathematical sciences deal. Thought is not a

means of solving the problems of this world as they arise, but a great

process of realization in which this world is forever transcended. Its

abstract particularities of sensuous detail belong only to the finite

experience of the partial self. This world is, therefore, always

incomplete in its reality and, in so far, always untrue. Truth and full

reality belong not to the field of scientific investigation.

In its metaphysics Romantic Idealism, though it finds a place for

scientific discovery and reconstruction, leaves these disdainfully

behind, as incomplete phases of the ultimate process of reality, as

infected with untruth and deceptive unwarranted claims. The world is

still too much with us. We recognize here three striking results of the

development of reflective consciousness in the modern world:--first, it

is assumed that the objective world of knowledge can be placed within

the experience of the individual without losing thereby its nature as an

object, that all characters of that object can be presented as belonging

to that experience, whether adequately or not is another question; and

second, it is assumed that the contradictions in its nature which are

associated with its inclusion in individual experience, its references

beyond itself when so included, may themselves be the starting-point of

a reconstruction which at least carries that object beyond the

experience within which these contradictions arose; and third, it is

assumed that this growth takes place in a world of reality within which

the incomplete experience of the individual is an essential part of the

process, in which it is not a mere fiction, destroying reality by its

representation, but is a growing-point in that reality itself.

These characters of philosophic interpretation, the inclusion of the

object of knowledge in the individual experience and the turning of the

conflicts in that experience into the occasion for the creation of new

objects transcending these contradictions, are the characters in the

conscious method, of modern science, which most profoundly distinguish

it from the method of ancient science. This, of course, is tantamount to

saying that they are those which mark the experimental method in

science.

That phase of the method upon which I have touched already has been its

occupation with the so-called data or facts as distinguished from

Aristotelian individuals.

Whenever we reduce the objects of scientific investigation to facts and

undertake to record them as such, they become events, happenings, whose

hard factual character lies in the circumstance that they have taken

place, and this quite independently of any explanation of their taking

place. When they are explained they have ceased to be facts and have

become instances of a law, that is, Aristotelian individuals, embodied

theories, and their actuality as events is lost in the necessity of

their occurrence as expressions of the law; with this change their

particularity as events or happenings disappears. They are but the

specific values of the equation when constants are substituted for

variables. Before the equation is known or the law discovered they have

no such ground of existence. Up to this point they find their ground for

existence in their mere occurrence, to which the law which is to explain

them must accommodate itself.

There are here suggested two points of view from which these facts may

be regarded. Considered with reference to a uniformity or law by which

they will be ordered and explained they are the phenomena with which the

positivist deals; as existencies to be identified and localized before

they are placed within such a uniformity they fall within the domain of

the psychological philosopher who can at least place them in their

relation to the other events in the experience of the individual who

observes them. Considered as having a residual meaning apart from the

law to which they have become exceptions, they can become the

subject-matter of the rationalist. It is important that we recognize

that neither the positivist nor the rationalist is able to identify the

nature of the fact or datum to which they refer. I refer to such

stubborn facts as those of the sporadic appearance of infectious

diseases before the germ theory of the disease was discovered. Here was

a fact which contradicted the doctrine of the spread of the infection by

contact. It appeared not as an instance of a law, but as an exception to

a law. As such, its nature is found in its having happened at a given

place and time. If the case had appeared in the midst of an epidemic,

its nature as a case of the infectious disease would have been cared for

in the accepted doctrine, and for its acceptance as an object of

knowledge its location in space and time as an event would not have been

required. Its geographical and historical traits would have followed

from the theory of the infection, as we identify by our calculations the

happy fulfilment of Thales' prophecy. The happening of an instance of a

law is accounted for by the law. Its happening may and in most instances

does escape observation, while as an exception to an accepted law it

captures attention. Its nature as an event is, then, found in its

appearance in the experience of some individual, whose observation is

controlled and recorded as his experience. Without its reference to this

individual's experience it could not appear as a fact for further

scientific consideration.

Now the attitude of the positivist toward this fact is that induced by

its relation to the law which is _subsequently_ discovered. It has then

fallen into place in a series, and his doctrine is that all laws are but

uniformities of such events. He treats the fact when it is an exception

to law as an instance of the new law and assumes that the exception to

the old law and the instance of the new are identical. And this is a

great mistake,--the mistake made also by the neo-realist when he assumes

that the object of knowledge is the same within and without the mind,

that nothing happens to what is to be known when it by chance strays

into the realm of conscious cognition. Any as yet unexplained exception

to an old theory can happen only in the experience of an individual, and

that which has its existence as an event in some one's biography is a

different thing from the future instance which is not beholden to any

one for its existence. Yet there are, as I indicated earlier, meanings

in this exceptional event which, at least for the time, are unaffected

by the exceptional character of the occurrence. For example, certain

clinical symptoms by which an infectious disease is identified have

remained unchanged in diagnosis since the days of Hippocrates. These

characters remain as characters of the instance of the law of

germ-origin when this law has been discovered. This may lead us to say

that the exception which appears for the time being as a unique incident

in a biography is identical with the instance of a germ-induced disease.

Indeed, we are likely to go further and, in the assurance of the new

doctrine, state that former exceptions can (or with adequate

acquaintance with the facts could) be proved to be necessarily an

instance of a disease carried by a germ. The positivist is therefore

confident that the field of scientific knowledge is made up of events

which are instances of uniform series, although under conditions of

inadequate information some of them appear as exceptions to the

statements of uniformities, in truth the latter being no uniformities at

all.

That this is not a true statement of the nature of the exception and of

the instance, it is not difficult to show if we are willing to accept

the accounts which the scientists themselves give of their own

observation, the changing forms which the hypothesis assumes during the

effort to reach a solution and the ultimate reconstruction which attends

the final tested solution. Wherever we are fortunate enough, as in the

biographies of men such as Darwin and Pasteur, to follow a number of the

steps by which they recognized problems and worked out tenable

hypotheses for their solution, we find that the direction which is given

to attention in the early stage of scientific investigation is toward

conflicts between current theories and observed phenomena, and that

since the form which these observations take is determined by the

opposition, it is determined by a statement which itself is later

abandoned. We find that the scope and character of the observations

change at once when the investigator sets about gathering as much of the

material as he can secure, and changes constantly as he formulates

tentative hypotheses for the solution of the problem, which, moreover,

generally changes its form during the investigation. I am aware that

this change in the form of the data will be brushed aside by many as

belonging only to the attitude of mind of the investigator, while it is

assumed that the "facts" themselves, however selected and organized in

his observation and thought, remain identical in their nature

throughout. Indeed, the scientist himself carries with him in the whole

procedure the confidence that the fact-structure of reality is

unchanged, however varied are the forms of the observations which refer

to the same entities.[35]

The analysis of the fact-structure of reality shows in the first place

that the scientist undertakes to form such an hypothesis that all the

data of observation will find their place in the objective world, and in

the second place to bring them into such a structure that future

experience will lead to anticipated results. He does not undertake to

preserve facts in the form in which they existed in experience before

the problem arose nor to construct a world independent of experience or

that will not be subject itself to future reconstructions in experience.

He merely insists that future reconstructions will take into account

the old in re-adjusting it to the new. In such a process it is evident

that the change of the form in the data is not due to a subjective

attitude of the investigator which can be abstracted from the facts.

When Darwin, for instance, found that the marl dressings which farmers

spread over their soil did not sink through the soil by the force of

gravity as was supposed, but that the earthworm castings were thrown up

above these dressings at nearly the same rate at which they disappeared,

he did not correct a subjective attitude of mind. He created in

experience a humus which took the place of a former soil, and justified

itself by fitting it into the whole process of disintegration of the

earth's surface. It would be impossible to separate in the earlier

experiences certain facts and certain attitudes of mind entertained

by men with reference to these facts. Certain objects have replaced

other objects. It is only after the process of analysis, which arose

out of the conflicting observations, has broken up the old object

that what was a part of the object, heavier-things-pushing-their

way-through-soil-of-lighter-texture, can become a mere idea. Earlier it

was an object. Until it could be tested the earthworm as the cause of

the disappearance of the dressings was also Darwin's idea. It became

fact. For science at least it is quite impossible to distinguish between

what in an object must be fact and what may be idea. The distinction

when it is made is dependent upon the form of the problem and is

functional to its solution, not metaphysical. So little can a consistent

line of cleavage between facts and ideas be indicated, that we can

never tell where in our world of observation the problem of science will

arise, or what will be regarded as structure of reality or what

erroneous idea.

There is a strong temptation to lodge these supposititious

fact-structures in a world of conceptual objects, molecules, atoms,

electrons, and the like. For these at least lie beyond the range of

perception by their very definition. They seem to be in a realm of

things-in-themselves. Yet they also are found now in the field of

fact and now in that of ideas. Furthermore, a study of their structure

as they exist in the world of constructive science shows that

their infra-sensible character is due simply to the nature of our

sense-processes, not to a different metaphysical nature. They occupy

space, have measurable dimensions, mass, and are subject to the same

laws of motion as are sensible objects. We even bring them indirectly

into the field of vision and photograph their paths of motion.

The ultimate elements referred to above provide a consistent symbolism

for the finding and formulating of applied mathematical sciences, within

which lies the whole field of physics, including Euclidian geometry as

well. However, they have succeeded in providing nothing more than a

language and logic pruned of the obstinate contradictions, inaccuracies,

and unanalyzed sensuous stuff of earlier mathematical science. Such a

rationalistic doctrine can never present in an unchanged form the

objects with which natural science deals in any of the stages of its

investigation. It can deal only with ultimate elements and forms of

propositions. It is compelled to fall back on a theory of analysis

which reaches ultimate elements and an assumption of inference as an

indefinable. Such an analysis is actually impossible either in the field

of the conceptual objects into which physical science reduces physical

objects, or in the field of sensuous experience. Atoms can be reduced

into positive and negative electrical elements and these may, perhaps

do, imply a structure of ether that again invites further analysis and

so on ad infinitum. None of the hypothetical constructs carry with

themselves the character of being ultimate elements unless they are

purely metaphysical. If they are fashioned to meet the actual problems

of scientific research they will admit of possible further analysis,

because they must be located and defined in the continuity of space and

time. They cannot _be_ the points and instants of modern mathematical

theory. Nor can we reach ultimate elements in sensuous experience, for

this lies also within a continuum. Furthermore, our scientific analyses

are dependent upon the form that our objects assume. There is no general

analysis which research in science has ever used. The assumption that

psychology provides us with an analysis of experience which can be

carried to ultimate elements or facts, and which thereby provides the

elements out of which the objects of our physical world must be

constructed, denies to psychology its rights as a natural science of

which it is so jealous, turning it into a Berkeleyan metaphysics.

This most modern form of rationalism being unable to find ultimate

elements in the field of actual science is compelled to take what it

can find there. Now the results of the analysis of the classical English

psychological school give the impression of being what Mr. Russell calls

"hard facts," i.e., facts which cannot be broken up into others. They

seem to be the data of experience. Moreover, the term hard is not so

uncompromising as is the term element. A fact can be more or less hard,

while an ultimate element cannot be more or less ultimate. Furthermore,

the entirely formal character of the logic enables it to deal with equal

facility with any content. One can operate with the more or less hard

sense-data, putting them in to satisfy the seeming variables of the

propositions, and reach conclusions which are formally correct. There is

no necessity for scrutinizing the data under these circumstances, if one

can only assume that the data are those which science is actually using.

The difficulty is that no scientist ever analyzed his objects into such

sense-data. They exist only in philosophical text-books. Even the

psychologists recognize that these sensations are abstractions which are

not the elements out of which objects of sense are constructed. They are

abstractions made from those objects whose ground for isolation is found

in the peculiar problems of experimental psychology, such as those of

color or tone perception. It would be impossible to make anything in

terms of Berkeleyan sense-data and of symbolic logic out of any

scientific discovery. Research defines its problem by isolating certain

facts which appear for the time being not as the sense-data of a

solipsistic mind, but as experiences of an individual in a highly

organized society, facts which, because they are in conflict with

accepted doctrines, must be described so that they can be experienced by

others under like conditions. The ground for the analysis which leads to

such facts is found in the conflict between the accepted theory and the

experience of the individual scientist. The analysis is strictly _ad

hoc_. As far as possible the exception is stated in terms of accepted

meanings. Only where the meaning is in contradiction with the experience

does the fact appear as the happening to an individual and become a

paragraph out of his biography. But as such an event, whose existence

for science depends upon the acceptance of the description of him to

whom it has happened, it must have all the setting of circumstantial

evidence. Part of this circumstantial evidence is found in so-called

scientific control, that is, the evidence that conditions were such that

similar experiences could happen to others and could be described as

they are described in the account given. Other parts of this evidence

which we call corroborative are found in the statements of others which

bear out details of this peculiar event, though it is important to note

that these details have to be wrenched from their settings to give this

corroborative value. To be most conclusive they must have no intentional

connection with the experience of the scientist. In other words, those

individuals who corroborate the facts are made, in spite of themselves,

experiencers of the same facts. The perfection of this evidence is

attained when the fact can happen to others and the observer simply

details the conditions under which he made the observation, which can

be then so perfectly reproduced that others may repeat the exceptional

experience.

This process is not an analysis of a known world into ultimate elements

and their relations. Such an analysis never isolates this particular

exception which constitutes the scientific problems as an individual

experience. The extent to which the analysis is carried depends upon the

exigencies of the problem. It is the indefinite variety of the problems

which accounts for the indefinite variety of the facts. What constitutes

them facts in the sense in which we are using the term is their

_exceptional_ nature; formally they appear as particular judgments,

being denials of universal judgments, whether positive or negative. This

exceptional nature robs the events of a reality which would have

belonged to them as instances of a universal law. It leaves them,

however, with the rest of their meaning. But the value which they have

lost is just that which was essential to give them their place in the

world as it has existed for thought. Banished from that universally

valid structure, their ground for existence is found in the experience

of the puzzled observer. Such an observation was that of the moons of

Jupiter made possible by the primitive telescope of Galileo. For those

who lived in a Ptolemaic cosmos, these could have existence only as

observations of individuals. As moons they had distinct meaning,

circling Jupiter as our moon circles the earth, but being in

contradiction with the Ptolemaic order they could depend for their

existence only on the evidence of the senses, until a Copernican order

could give them a local habitation and a name. Then they were observed

not as the experiences of individuals but as instances of planetary

order in a heliocentric system. It would be palpably absurd to refer to

them as mere sense-data, mere sensations. They are for the time being

inexplicable experiences of certain individuals. They are inexplicable

because they have a meaning which is at variance with the structure of

the whole world to which they belong. They are the phenomena termed

accidental by Aristotle and rejected as full realities by him, but which

have become, in the habitat of individual experience, the headstone of

the structure of modern research of science.

A rationalism which relegates implication to the indefinables cannot

present the process of modern science. Implication is exactly that

process by which these events pass from their individual existence into

that of universal reality, and the scientist is at pains to define it as

the experimental method. It is true that a proposition implies

implication. But the proposition is the statement of the result of the

process by which an object has arisen for knowledge and merely indicates

the structure of the object. In discovery, invention, and research the

escape from the exceptional, from the data of early stages of

observation, is by way of an hypothesis; and every hypothesis so far as

it is tenable and workable in its form is universal. No one would waste

his time with a hypothesis which confessedly was not applicable to all

instances of the problem. An hypothesis may be again and again

abandoned, it may prove to be faulty and contradictory, but in so far as

it is an instrument of research it is assumed to be universal and to

perfect a system which has broken down at the point indicated by the

problem. Implication and more elaborated instances flow from the

structure of this hypothesis. The classical illustration which stands at

the door of modern experimental science is the hypothesis which Galileo

formed of the rate of the velocity of a falling body. He conceived that

this was in proportion to the time elapsed during the fall and then

elaborated the consequences of this hypothesis by working it into the

accepted mathematical doctrines of the physical world, until it led to

an anticipated result which would be actually secured and which would be

so characteristic an instance of a falling body that it would answer to

every other instance as he had defined them. In this fashion he defined

his inference as the anticipation of a result because this result was a

part of the world as he presented it amended by his hypothesis. It is

true that back of the specific implication of this result lay a mass of

other implications, many not even presented specifically in thought and

many others presented by symbols which generalized innumerable

instances. These implications are for the scientist more or less

implicit meanings, but they are meanings each of which may be brought

into question and tested in the same fashion if it should become an

actual problem. Many of them which would not have occurred to Galileo as

possible problems have been questioned since his day. What has remained

after this period of determined questioning of the foundations of

mathematics and the structure of the world of physical science is a

method of agreement with oneself and others, in (a) the identification

of the object of thought, in (b) the accepted values of assent and

denial called truth and falsehood, and in (c) referring to meaning, in

its relation to what is meant. In any case the achievement of symbolic

logic, with its indefinables and axioms has been to reduce this logic to

a statement of the most generalized form of possible consistent thought

intercourse, with entire abstraction from the content of the object to

which it refers. If, however, we abstract from its value in giving a

consistent theory of number, continuity, and infinity, this complete

abstraction from the content has carried the conditions of thinking in

agreement with self and others so far away from the actual problem of

science that symbolic logic has never been used as a research method. It

has indeed emphasized the fact that thinking deals with problems which

have reference to uses to which it can be put, not to a metaphysical

world lying beyond experience. Symbolic logic has to do with the world

of discourse, not with the world of things.

What Russell pushes to one side as a happy guess is the actual process

of implication by which, for example, the minute form in the diseased

human system is identified with unicellular life and the history of the

disease with the life history of this form. This identification implies

reclassification of these forms and a treatment of the disease that

answers to their life history. Having made this identification we

anticipate the result of this treatment, calling it an inference.

Implication belongs to the reconstruction of the object. As long as no

question has arisen, the object is what it means or means what it is. It

does not imply any feature of itself. When through conflict with the

experience of the individual some feature of the object is divorced from

some meaning the relationship between these becomes a false implication.

When a hypothetically reconstructed object finds us anticipating a

result which accords with the nature of such objects we assert an

implication of this meaning. To carry this relation of implication back

into objects which are subject to no criticism or question would of

course resolve the world into elements connected by external relations,

with the added consequence that these elements can have no content,

since every content in the face of such an analysis must be subject to

further analysis. We reach inevitably symbols such as X, Y, and Z, which

can symbolize nothing. Theoretically we can assume an implication

between any elements of an object, but in this abstract assumption the

symbolic logician overlooks the fact that he is also assuming some

content which is not analyzed and which is the ground of the

implication. In other words this logician confuses the scientific

attitude of being ready to question anything with an attitude of being

willing to question everything at once. It is only in an unquestioned

objective world that the exceptional instance appears and it is only in

such a world that an experimental science tests the implications of the

hypothetically reconstructed object.

The guess is happy because it carries with it the consequences which

follow from its fitting into the world, and the guess, in other words

the hypothesis, takes on this happy form solely because of the material

reconstruction which by its nature removes the unhappy contradiction and

promises the successful carrying out of the conflicting attitudes in the

new objective world. There is no such thing as formal implication.

Where no reconstruction of the world is involved in our identification

of objects that belong to it and where, therefore, no readjustment of

conduct is demanded, such a logic symbolizes what takes place in our

direct recognition of objects and our response to them. Then "X is a man

implies X is mortal for all values of X" exactly symbolizes the attitude

toward a man subject to a disease supposedly mortal. But it fails to

symbolize the biological research which starting with inexplicable

sporadic cases of an infectious disease carries over from the study of

the life history of infusoria a hypothetical reconstruction of the

history of disease and then acts upon the result of this assumption.

Research-science presents a world whose form is always universal, but

this universal form is neither a metaphysical assumption nor a fixed

form of the understanding. While the scientist may as a metaphysician

assume the existence of realities which lie beyond a possible

experience, or be a Kantian or Neo-Kantian, neither of these attitudes

is necessary for his research. He may be a positivist--a disciple of

Hume or of John Stuart Mill. He may be a pluralist who conceives, with

William James, that the order which we detect in parts of the universe

is possibly one that is rising out of the chaos and which may never be

as universal as our hypothesis demands. None of these attitudes has any

bearing upon his scientific method. This simplifies his thinking,

enables him to identify the object in which he is interested wherever he

finds it, and to abstract in the world as he conceives it those features

which carry with them the occurrence he is endeavoring to place.

Especially it enables him to make his thought a part of the socially

accepted and socially organized science to which his thought belongs. He

is far too modest to demand that the world be as his inference demands.

He asks that his view of the world be cogent and convincing to all those

whose thinking has made his own possible, and be an acceptable premise

for the conduct of that society to which he belongs. The hypothesis has

no universal and necessary characters except those that belong to the

thought which preserves the same meanings to the same objects, the same

relations between the same relata, the same attributes of assent and

dissent under the same conditions, the same results of the same

combinations of the same things. For scientific research the meanings,

the relations with the relata, the assent and dissent, the combinations

and the things combined are all in the world of experience. Thinking in

its abstractions and identifications and reconstructions undertakes to

preserve the values that it finds, and the necessity of its thinking

lies in its ability to so identify, preserve, and combine what it has

isolated that the thought structure will have an identical import under

like conditions for the thinker with all other thinkers to whom these

instruments of research conduct are addressed. Whatever conclusions the

scientist draws as necessary and universal results from his hypothesis

for a world independent of his thought are due, not to the cogency of

his logic, but to other considerations. For he knows if he reflects that

another problem may arise which will in its solution change the face of

the world built upon the present hypothesis. He will defend the

inexorableness of his reasoning, but the premises may change. Even the

contents of tridimensional space and sensuous time are not essential to

the cogency of that reasoning nor can the unbroken web of the argument

assure the content of the world as invariable. His universals, when

applied to nature, are all hypothetical universals; hence the import of

experiment as the test of an hypothesis. Experience does not rule out

the possible cropping up of a new problem which may shift the values

attained. Experience simply reveals that the new hypothesis fits into

the meanings of the world which are not shaken; it shows that, with the

reconstruction which the hypothesis offers, it is possible for

scientific conduct to proceed.

But if the universal character of the hypothesis and the tested theory

belong to the instrumental character of thought in so reconstructing a

world that has proved to be imperfect, and inadequate to conduct, the

stuff of the world and of the new hypothesis are the same. At least this

is true for the scientist who has no interest in an epistemological

problem that does not affect his scientific undertakings in one way nor

another. I have already pointed out that from the standpoint of logical

and psychological analysis the things with which science deals can be

neither ultimate elements nor sense-data; but that they must be phases

and characters and parts of things in some whole, parts which can only

be isolated because of the conflict between an accepted meaning and some

experience. I have pointed out that an analysis is guided by the

practical demands of a solution of this conflict; that even that which

is individual in its most unique sense in the conflict and in attempts

at its solution does not enter into the field of psychology--which has

its own problems peculiar to its science. Certain psychological problems

belong to the problems of other sciences, as, for example, that of the

personal equation belongs to astronomy or that of color vision to the

theory of light. But they bulk small in these sciences. It cannot be

successfully maintained that a scientific observation of the most unique

sort, one which is accepted for the time being simply as a happening in

this or that scientist's experience, is as such a psychological datum,

for the data in psychological text-books have reference to

_psychological_ problems. Psychology deals with the consciousness of the

individual in its dependence upon the physiological organism and upon

those contents which detach themselves from the objects outside the

individual and which are identified with his inner experience. It deals

with the laws and processes and structures of this consciousness in all

its experiences, not with _exceptional_ experiences. It is necessary to

emphasize again that for science these particular experiences arise

within a world which is in its logical structure organized and

universal. They arise only through the conflict of the individual's

experience with such an accepted structure. For science individual

experience _presupposes_ the organized structure; hence it cannot

provide the material out of which the structure is built up. This is the

error of both the positivist and of the psychological philosopher, if

scientific procedure gives us in any sense a picture of the situation.

A sharp contrast appears between the accepted hypothesis with its

universal form and the experiences which invalidate the earlier theory.

The reality of these experiences lies in their happening. They were

unpredictable. They are not instances of a law. The later theory, the

one which explains these occurrences, changes their character and

status, making them necessary results of the world as that is conceived

under this new doctrine. This new standpoint carries with it a backward

view, which explains the erroneous doctrine, and accounts for the

observations which invalidated it. Every new theory must take up into

itself earlier doctrines and rationalize the earlier exceptions. A

generalization of this attitude places the scientist in the position of

anticipating later reconstructions. He then must conceive of his world

as subject to continuous reconstructions. A familiar interpretation of

his attitude is that the hypothesis is thus approaching nearer and

nearer toward a reality which would never change if it could be

attained, or, from the standpoint of the Hegelian toward a goal at

infinity. The Hegelian also undertakes to make this continuous process

of reconstruction an organic phase in reality and to identify with

nature the process of finding exceptions and of correcting them. The

fundamental difference between this position and that of the scientist

who looks before and after is that the Hegelian undertakes to make the

exception in its exceptional character a part of the reality which

transcends it, while the scientist usually relegates the exception to

the experience of individuals who were simply caught in an error which

later investigation removes.

The error remains as an historical incident explicable perhaps as a

result of the conditions under which it occurred, but in so far as it

was an error, not a part of reality. It is customary to speak of it as

subjective, though this implies that we are putting the man who was

unwittingly in error into the position of the one who has corrected it.

To entertain that error in the face of its correction would be

subjective. A result of this interpretation is that the theories are

abstracted from the world and regarded as something outside it. It is

assumed that the theories are mental or subjective and change while the

facts remain unchanged. Even when it is assumed that theories and facts

agree, men speak of a correspondence or parallelism between idea and the

reality to which it refers. While this attitude seems to be that of

science toward the disproved theories which lie behind it, it is not its

attitude to the theories which it accepts. These are not regarded as

merely parallel to realities, as abstracted from the structure of

things. These meanings go into the makeup of the world. It is true that

the scientist who looks before and after realizes that any specific

meaning which is now accepted may be questioned and discarded. If he

carries his refection far enough he sees that a complete elimination of

all the meanings which might conceivably be so discredited would leave

nothing but logical constants, a world with no facts in any sense. In

this position he may of course take an agnostic attitude and be

satisfied with the attitude of Hume or Mill or Russell. But if he does

so, he will pass into the camp of the psychological philosophers and

will have left the position of the scientist. The scientist always deals

with an _actual_ problem, and even when he looks before and after he

does so in so far as he is facing in inquiry some actual problem. No

actual problem could conceivably take on the form of a conflict

involving the whole world of meaning. The conflict always arises between

an individual experience and certain laws, certain meanings while others

are unaffected. These others form the necessary field without which no

conflict can arise. They give the man of research his ([Greek: pou sto])

upon which he can formulate his problem and undertake its solution. The

possible calling in question of any content, whatever it may be, means

always that there is left a field of unquestioned reality. The attitude

of the scientist never contemplates or could contemplate the possibility

of a world in which there would be no reality by which to test his

hypothetical solution of the problem that arises. Nor does this attitude

when applied to past discarded theories necessarily carry with it the

implication that these older theories were subjective ideas in men's

minds, while the reality lay beside and beyond them unmingled with

ideas. It always finds a standpoint from which these ideas in the

earlier situation are still recognized as reliable, for there are no

scientific data without meanings. There could be no history of science

on any other basis. No history of science goes back to ultimate elements

or sense-data, or to any combination of bare data on one hand and

logical elements on the other. The world of the scientist is always

there as one in which reconstruction is taking place with continual

shifting of problems, but as a real world within which the problems

arise. The errors of the past and present appear as untenable hypotheses

which could not bear the test of experiment if the experience were

sufficiently enlarged and interpreted. But they are not mere errors to

be thrown into the scrap heap. They become a part of a different phase

of reality which a fuller history of the past records or a fuller

account of the present interprets, giving them thereby their proper

place in a real world.[36]

The completion of this program, however, awaits the solution of the

scientific problem of the relation of the psychical and the physical

with the attendant problem of the meaning of the so-called origin of

consciousness in the history of the world. My own feeling is that these

problems must be attacked from the standpoint of the social nature of

so-called consciousness. The clear indications of this I find in the

reference of our logical constants to the structure of thought as a

means of communication, in the explanation of errors in the history of

science by their social determination, and in the interpretation of the

inner field of experience as the importation of social intercourse into

the conscious conduct of the individual. But whatever may be the

solution of these problems, it must carry with it such a treatment of

the experience of the individual that the latter will never be regarded

merely as a subjective state, however inadequate it may have proved

itself as a scientific hypothesis. This seems to me to be involved in

the conception of psychology as a natural science and in any legitimate

carrying out of the Hegelian program of giving reality and creative

import to individual experience. The experience of the individual in its

exceptional character is the growing-point of science, first of all in

the recognition of data upon which the older theories break, and second

in the hypothesis which arises in the individual and is tested by the

experiment which reconstructs the world. A scientific history and a

scientific psychology from which epistemology has been banished must

place these observations and hypotheses together with erroneous

conceptions and mistaken observations _within_ the real world in such a

fashion that their reference to the experience of the individual and to

the world to which he belongs will be comprehensible. As I have

indicated, the scientific theory of the physical and conscious

individual in the world implied in this problem has still to be

adequately developed. But there is implied in the conception of such a

theory such a location of the process of thought in the process of

reality as will give it an import both in the meaning of things and in

the individual's thinking. We have the beginning of such a doctrine in

the conception of a functional value of consciousness in the conduct of

living forms, and the development of reflective thought out of such a

consciousness which puts it within the act and gives it the function of

preparation where adjustment is necessary. Such a process creates the

situation with reference to which the form acts. In all adjustment or

adaptation the result is that the form which is adjusted finds that by

its adjustment it has created an environment. The ancients by their

formulation of the Ptolemaic theory committed themselves to the world in

which the fixed values of the heavenly over against the earthly

obtained. Such a world was the interpretation of the experience involved

in their physical and social attitudes. They could not accept the

hypothesis of Aristarchus because it conflicted with the world which

they had created, with the values which were determining values for

them. The same was true of the hypothesis of Democritus. They could not,

as they conceived the physical world, accept its purely quantitative

character. The conception of a disinterested truth which we have

cherished since the Middle Ages is itself a value that has a social

basis as really as had the dogma of the church. The earliest statement

of it was perhaps that of Francis Bacon. Freeing investigation from the

church dogma and its attendant logic meant to him the freedom to find in

nature what men needed and could use for the amelioration of their

social and physical condition. The full implication of the doctrine has

been recognized as that of freedom, freedom to effect not only values

already recognized, but freedom to attain as well such complete

acquaintance with nature that new and unrecognized uses would be at our

disposal; that is, that progress should be one toward any possible use

to which increased knowledge might lead. The cult of increasing

knowledge, of continually reconstructing the world, took the place both

of the ancient conception of adequately organizing the world as

presented in thought, and of the medieval conception of a systematic

formulation on the basis of the statement in church dogma of social

values. This modern conception proceeds from the standpoint not of

formulating values, but giving society at the moment the largest

possible number of alternatives of conduct, i.e., undertaking to fix

from moment to moment the widest possible field of conduct. The purposes

of conduct are to be determined in the presence of a field of

alternative possibilities of action. The ends of conduct are not to be

determined in advance, but in view of the interests that fuller

knowledge of conditions awaken. So there appears a conception of

determining the field that shall be quite independent of given values. A

real world which consists not of an unchanged universe, but of a

universe which may be continually readjusted according to the problems

arising in the consciousness of the individuals within society. The

seemingly fixed character of such a world is found in the generally

fixed conditions which underlie the type of problems which we find. We

determine the important conditions incident to the working out of the

great problems which face us. Our conception of a given universe is

formed in the effort to mobilize all the material about us in relation

to these problems--the structure of the self, the structure of matter,

the physical process of life, the laws of change and the interrelation

of changes. With reference to these problems certain conditions appear

fixed and become the statement of the world by which we must determine

by experimental test the viability of our hypotheses. There arises then

the conception of a world which is unquestioned over against any

particular problem. While our science continually changes that world, at

least it must be always realized as there. On the other hand, these

conceptions are after all relative to the ends of social conduct which

may be formulated in the presence of any freedom of action.

We postulate freedom of action as the condition of formulating the ends

toward which our conduct shall be directed. Ancient thought assured

itself of its ends of conduct and allowed these to determine the world

which tested its hypothesis. We insist such ends may not be formulated

until we know the field of possible action. The formulation of the ends

is essentially a social undertaking and seems to follow the statement of

the field of possible conduct, while in fact the statement of the

possible field of conduct is actually dependent on the push toward

action. A moving end which is continually reconstructing itself follows

upon the continually enlarging field of opportunities of conduct.

The conception of a world of existence, then, is the result of the

determination at the moment of the conditions of the solution of the

given problems. These problems constitute the conditions of conduct, and

the ends of conduct can only be determined as we realize the

possibilities which changing conditions carry with them. Our world of

reality thus becomes independent of any special ends or purposes and we

reach an entirely disinterested knowledge. And yet the value and import

of this knowledge is found in our conduct and in our continually

changing conditions. Knowledge for its own sake is the slogan of

freedom, for it alone makes possible the continual reconstruction and

enlargement of the ends of conduct.

The individual in his experiences is continually creating a world which

becomes real through his discovery. In so far as new conduct arises

under the conditions made possible by his experience and his hypothesis

the world, which may be made the test of reality, has been modified and

enlarged.

I have endeavored to present the world which is an implication of the

scientific method of discovery with entire abstraction from any

epistemological or metaphysical presuppositions or complications.

Scientific method is indifferent to a world of things-in-themselves, or

to the previous condition of philosophic servitude of those to whom its

teachings are addressed. It is a method not of knowing the unchangeable

but of determining the form of the world within which we live as it

changes from moment to moment. It undertakes to tell us what we may

expect to happen when we act in such or such a fashion. It has become a

matter of serious consideration for a philosophy which is interested in

a world of things-in-themselves, and the epistemological problem. For

the cherished structures of the metaphysical world, having ceased to

house the values of mankind, provide good working materials in the

hypothetical structures of science, on condition of surrendering their

metaphysical reality; and the epistemological problem, having seemingly

died of inanition, has been found to be at bottom a problem of method or

logic. My attempt has been to present what seems to me to be two capital

instances of these transformations. Science always has a world of

reality by which to test its hypotheses, but this world is not a world

independent of scientific experience, but the immediate world

surrounding us within which we must act. Our next action may find these

conditions seriously changed, and then science will formulate this world

so that in view of this problem we may logically construct our next plan

of action. The plan of action should be made self-consistent and

universal in its form, not that we may thus approach nearer to a

self-consistent and universal reality which is independent of our

conduct, but because our plan of action needs to be intelligent and

generally applicable. Again science advances by the experiences of

individuals, experiences which are different from the world in which

they have arisen and which refer to a world which is not yet in

existence, so far as scientific experience is concerned. But this

relation to the old and new is not that of a subjective world to an

objective universe, but is a process of logical reconstruction by which

out of exceptions the new law arises to replace a structure that has

become inadequate.

In both of these processes, that of determining the structure of

experience which will test by experiment the legitimacy of the new

hypothesis, and that of formulating the problem and the hypothesis for

its solution, the individual functions in his full particularity, and

yet in organic relationship with the society that is responsible for

him. It is the import for scientific method of this relationship that

promises most for the interpretation of the philosophic problems

involved.