SCIENCE (and common SENSE ) 43 



already won, scientists come to seek more widely and tenaciously for 

 continuity and determinism, even where common sense wholly de- 

 spairs of finding them. Particularly as regards regularity, the scien- 

 tist's horizon of expectation is ever expanding. He finds then even 

 in wholly impersonal data a compelling excitement to which the man 

 of common sense is utterly unawakened. For, says Maxwell: 



It is a universal condition of the enjoyable that the mind must believe 

 in the existence of a [discoverable] law and yet have a mystery to 

 move in. 



The Organization of Experience 



Science involves a fourth stage in the organization of experience, of 

 a sort unknown to common sense. But this fourth stage is not a super- 

 structure built on the otherwise unchanged foundation aflForded by 

 the first three. The colligative relations of science diflFer from those 

 of common sense, if only because they involve different concepts. 

 And, deploying different concepts, the scientist often arrives at con- 

 structs different from those of the man in the street. Let us now sub- 

 ject science to the successive steps of analysis earlier carried out on 

 common sense. 



CONSTRUCTS 



The scientist is likely to make common-sense constructs of whatever 

 does not immediately concern him as scientist. Conditioned by a 

 massive common heritage, he is predisposed toward the constructs 

 made by the man of common sense whenever they share the same 

 purpose. Presumably the scientist "sees" the table beneath his ap- 

 paratus as just the "support" it ordinarily seems to the common man. 

 The situation changes drastically when the scientist turns to things 

 that command his attention as scientist. When he looks at his manom- 

 eter he does not, like the ordinary man, see a constiaiction of glass, 

 held on steel supports, and containing mercury. Instead he is apt to 

 "see" only one aspect of his manometer, and that so trivial, appar- 

 ently, it might wholly escape the man of common sense. The scientist 

 sees focaUij only the difference in the height of the mercury columns. 

 His grasp of the scientific concept of pressure shapes his construct 

 of the manometer to highlight what is, for him, "die only thing that 

 matters." 



