PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 17 



heat and movement and pushes and pulls, which the scien- 

 tist has eliminated in favor of molecules and differential 

 velocities and pointer readings. Only through this sup- 

 plementation can one understand the world in its to- 

 tality. 



It seems likely that a thorough-going analysis of the 

 notions of quality and quantity would do much to obliterate 

 the sharpness of this distinction. There certainly is a sense 

 in which quantities are themselves qualities. In fact a 

 quality becomes a quantity just to the extent to which it 

 may be shown to have a certain place in a series of a spec- 

 ifiable kind. Qualities which are orderable are also quanti- 

 ties. When one thinks, for example, of the natural numbers 

 he tends to picture them as arranged in the order of magni- 

 tude, 1, 2, 3, 4, ... , rather than as a mere aggregate, 

 2, 4, 3, 1, . . . . Hence he tends to think of the differences 

 between them as being quantitative rather than qualitative. 

 Actually one can discover the same qualitative difference 

 between 2 and 3 that he can between red and green, though 

 the ready ordering of the numbers compels him to neglect 

 this difference in favor of a quantitative one. Though the 

 insertion of intervening members in the series, for example, 

 the fractions, tends to turn attention away from the qualita- 

 tive difference and toward the quantitative difference, the 

 former distinction remains and is found at the new level be- 

 tween any two fractions. To order is not to eliminate quality. 

 Serial arrangement serves only to replace qualities which 

 are not readily orderable by qualities which are. 



The distinction between science and philosophy can then 

 be expressed, though it takes a slightly different form. Sci- 

 ence is interested in the consideration of those qualitative 

 aspects of experience which are readily orderable, and es- 

 pecially in the supposed correlation between these qualities 

 and certain others of which they seem to be the measured 

 values. Physics, for example, is occupied with wave lengths 

 and with the functional relations between wave lengths and 

 colors. Philosophy, on the other hand, busies itself with those 



