COMMON SENSE (aND SCIENCE) 19 



is redundant. Yet it serves to emphasize the several senses in which 

 these relations represent a binding-together. Thus, for example, they 

 represent a binding-together in time: based on the past, they are 

 used in the present for prediction of the future. Also, these relations 

 associate certain concepts with each other, and thereby reaffiliate 

 the se\^eral elements of experience to which they refer. We link 

 "pressure" and "volume," or "water" and "level," or "child who has 

 been burned" and "fire." Most significantly, in colligative relations 

 we find perceptual and conceptual elements bound together in a 

 balance unduly weighted one way or the other when such relations 

 are termed "phenomenologic" or, contrarily, "causal." 



Phenomenologic means "descriptive of actual phenomena with 

 avoidance of all interpretation, explanation, and evaluation." A colli- 

 gative relation cannot so be described: it represents both much more 

 and much less than a "description of actual phenomena." Though I 

 have observed very few burned children, I make a general statement 

 about all such creatures in all times and places. Here I go far beyond 

 what I have obser\^ed. But also I say much less than I have observed. 

 The concepts figuring in the general statement single out only cer- 

 tain "significant" aspects of a complex total experience, other aspects 

 of which pass unmentioned, as "irrelevant." But irrelevance is not 

 "given"; it involves a judgment, an "evaluation." 



In Chapters II and V we shall examine in detail the multiple in- 

 terpretations, explanations, and evaluations we must go through to 

 reach a "purely scientific" relation such as Boyle's law. Only the ghost 

 of actual observations survives in the final statement of the law. To 

 describe such a relation as phenomenologic is folly; to describe it as 

 causal, equal folly. We may feel tempted to say that the doubling of 

 the pressure is the cause of the halving of the volume of a confined 

 gas at constant temperature. We might better confine ourselves to: 

 If the pressure on a confined gas at constant temperature is doubled, 

 then its volume will be hah^ed. Determinism is taken for granted, and 

 a causal connection is implied. But the assignment of causes is here 

 an act of supererogation: the acausal "if . . . then . . ." statement 

 alone discharges the predictive function of Boyle's law. 



The imputation of causes is more apparent but logically no less 

 superfluous in the colligative relations of common sense. Perhaps the 

 burned child's "dread" is the cause of his subsequent avoidance of 

 fire; but such dread is an hypothesis, not an observation. The useful- 



