24 COMMON SENSE (aND SCIENCE ) 



in colligative relations. A second group, of more abstract explicative 

 concepts, sketches the "causes" and other terms by means of which 

 we seek to grasp the relations. In principle only the indicati^'e con- 

 cepts are directly involved in making predictions— necessarily so 

 since, often, explicative concepts (perhaps figuring "unobservables") 

 do not refer to overt, recognizable things and situations. In practice 

 both groups of concepts are (and probably must be) used; the sec- 

 ond helping us to gain command of relations that function in terms 

 of the first. In common sense even loose and imprecise anthropo- 

 morphic concepts can offer a systematization highly effecti\'e as a 

 mnemonic de\dce. Personifying the things of which we would treat, 

 we imest them with desires and tendencies sufficiently like our own 

 tliat— understanding what our action would be— we easily remember 

 theirs. The child "dreads," water "seeks," nature "abhors," etc. We 

 grasp the relation because we seem to grasp the how of its pro- 

 duction. 



In common sense the fourth stage in the organization of experi- 

 ence never becomes fully explicit: the formation of a world-view is 

 not, after all, the business of common sense. Often little more than 

 a vague metaphor, the common-sense view of the world leaves a 

 great deal to the judgment and experience of the individual, to his 

 "feeling for die situation." Much has still to be memorized because 

 there remains much that, if "explained," is not yet truly rationalized. 

 The comparatively inchoate body of common sense contains myriad 

 relations not merely disconnected but as downright contradictory 

 as are the injunctions "look before you leap" and "he who hesitates 

 is lost." 



Science seeks to resolve, or suppress, such contradictions by a con- 

 scious effort mutually to adjust and to unite its myriad relations in 

 a fully explicit, comprehensive, rational order. No longer content to 

 possess Boyle's law, we wish to see Boyle's law in rational connec- 

 tion with a number of other colligative relations describing empiri- 

 cal regularities in the behavior of gases. The kinetic theory provides 

 just such a connection. The several relations now reappear as deduc- 

 tions from the few axioms postulated by the theory. In this dramati- 

 cally new fourth stage in the organization of experience we pass on 

 from colligative relations ("laws") to postulational systems ("theo- 

 ries"), and so achieve the order Einstein considers characteristically 

 that of science: 



