THE LOGICAL STRUCTURE OF SCIENCE 49 



organisms to stimuli of various kinds find themselves obliged 

 to talk about the chemical structure of organic compounds. 

 From a more general point of view, all attempts to limit 

 science to the natural as opposed to the supernatural, or 

 the real as opposed to the unreal, or the measurable as 

 opposed to the unmeasurable, end with the recognition that 

 the drawing of such lines is precisely the scientific activity 

 itself. The task of science toward the supernatural, the 

 unreal, and the unmeasurable is the application of scientific 

 techniques in such a way as to transform them into the 

 natural, the real, and the measurable. The miracles of 

 yesterday are the normal phenomena of today; hallucina- 

 tory objects of a former age are now explicable in terms of 

 biological and psychological laws; value attitudes, once 

 thought to be purely intensive in character, are now being 

 portrayed as graphs on coordinate systems. 



The result of all these considerations is that science be- 

 comes reluctant to characterize more specifically than is 

 necessary the type of entity about which it talks. Science 

 may justifiably study anything whatsoever, anything which 

 may be given in any sense. The realm of the known for 

 science is the realm of phenomena, whatever appears or 

 exhibits itself in a situation to which the general methods of 

 knowing are applicable. This will include the natural and 

 the supernatural, the real and the unreal, the measurable 

 and the unmeasurable, the material and the immaterial, 

 the public and the private, the past, present, and future, 

 the abstract and the concrete, the large and the small, the 

 extended and the brief. But science will not begin with 

 this unlimited complex; it will rather select those of its 

 aspects which are most clearly given and to which the 

 methods of science are most readily applicable. It will 

 direct its efforts, therefore, to the understanding of the 

 natural, the real, the measurable, the material, the public, 

 the present, the relatively concrete, the intermediary be- 

 tween the large and the small, and between the extended 

 and the brief. But since this represents simply a convenient 



