Nature of the Universe 

 of things into a doctrine and gave it a Greek name- 



a Greek name that sounds learned and profound, but 

 that means merely ignorance. I am sure that if Alice 

 had been compelled to formulate her philosophy of 

 Wonderland, she would have called it Agnosticism, 

 which means "I don't understand it at all." 



Nevertheless, there are certain things that we can 

 do with this confusing world, which help us in dealing 

 with it. We can observe carefully the things that hap- 

 pen in it ; we can record them and compare them. We 

 can intervene in them ourselves, we can change the 

 situation of things and discover what happens then; 

 this we call experimenting. We thus discover under 

 what conditions certain things occur ; and what differ- 

 ences in the results follow from changing the condi- 

 tions in certain ways. We thus discover that there are 

 certain uniformities, certain constancies in the chang- 

 ing world. We find that we can, to some extent, classify 

 things and events and their dependence on conditions. 

 In consequence, we can generalize, we can state what 

 we call rules or laws ; that is, we can make statements 

 which include several or many things or events in a 

 single proposition. We can say not merely that this 

 object gravitates toward the earth, but that all objects 

 (or at least many of them) gravitate together. We 

 can say, not only that the hereditary characteristics 

 of the fruit fly depend on the nature of its chromo- 

 somes, but also that the hereditary characteristics of 

 man and most other animals and plants depend on 

 their chromosomes. We can further make inferences 

 from what we observe, draw conclusions from them; 



