THE METHOD OF SCIENCE 59 



men. But nature is only the summation of observed facts 

 fitted into patterns which resume and classify them. 



The approach of a scientist to the phenomena which he 

 observes may be realized perhaps by means of an analogy. 

 Suppose you enter a room and see a man playing a violin. 

 You say at once that this is a musical instrument and is pro- 

 ducing sound. But suppose that the observer were abso- 

 lutely deaf from birth, had no idea of hearing, and had never 

 been told anything about sound or musical instruments, his 

 whole knowledge of the world having been achieved through 

 senses other than hearing. This deaf observer entering the 

 room where a violinist was playing would be entirely unable 

 to account for the phenomenon. He would see the move- 

 ments of the player, the operation of the bow on the strings, 

 the peculiarly shaped instrument, but the whole thing would 

 appear to him irrational. But if he were a scientist inter- 

 ested in phenomena and in their classification, he would pres- 

 ently find that the movement of the bow on the violin pro- 

 duced vibrations, and these vibrations could be detected by 

 means of physical instruments, and their wave form could be 

 observed. After some time, it might occur to him that the 

 vibrations of the strings and violin would be communicated 

 to the air and could be observed as changes of pressure. Then 

 he could record the changes of pressure produced in the air 

 in the playing of a piece of music, and by analyzing the record 

 could observe that the same groups of pressure changes were 

 repeated periodically. Eventually he could attain to a knowl- 

 edge of the whole phenomenon of music— the form of musical 

 composition and the nature of different musical forms— but 

 none of this would give him any approach to absolute truth 

 in that he would still be unaware of the existence of sound 

 as a sense and of the part that music could play in the mental 

 life of those who could hear. 



To the scientist as such, absolute reality has no meaning. 

 It is a metaphysical conception, not a scientific one. The 

 scientist neither affirms nor denies it; he merely ignores it. 

 His purpose in forming abstract ideas is to classify facts ob- 



