REPORT OF THIRTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 21 
There is another point of view from which I have been some- 
what interested to develop the implications of the doctrine of nerve 
components, that of scientific methology in general. 
It is said that scientific explanation consists essentially in 
such an organization of facts that they may be generalized or 
included under certain laws or uniformities which permit a fore- 
casting of future events. Now, without going into an exposition 
at this time of the implied philosophy of nature, I think that a 
little reflection will show that this statement, while true in a certain 
limited sense, is very defective. 
What is the nature of this organization of facts from which 
so great benefits are expected to flow? Can it in last analysis be 
anything other than the correlation of experience? All of the 
“facts” with which we deal have grown up in experience; they 
are in a literal sense the products of our experience. As men of 
science we have nothing to do with “‘things-in-themselves,” only 
with phenomena, out of which we have constructed by mental 
process certain objective things which we regard as real—‘‘con- 
structs,” or in common parlance, objects, facts, data. 
By these things which grew up in experience (we have in 
most cases forgotten how) we measure up and evaluate all new 
experience. If the new sense presentation is a yellow dog with 
white feet we assimilate it at once with previous experience and 
approve it as a valid fact. If, on the other hand, it is a green 
dog with thirteen scarlet heads each with a forked tongue, we 
are apt to ask, Am I awake or asleep? or, What was I drinking 
last night? Such an experience may be vividly real to me, but if 
awake. and sane I do not accredit it as an object of sense, as a 
fact of experience, unless I can correlate it with the body of fz 
already approved. 
But scientific laws are merely “facts” of wider import, which 
rest on a foundation of broader experience such that, when objecti- 
fied, they remain not as concrete elementary experiences but as 
general categories including many such elements. The scientific 
generalization or law must therefore be approved or evaluated in 
a way strictly analogous with that by which we test sense 
impressions ; that is, to be acceptable it must fit in harmoniously 
with the whole content of experience—‘‘it must explain all the 
facts.” 
In the solution of any scientific problem that method is most 
likely to lead directly to fruitful results, other things being equal, 
which favors thé correlation of the data all along the line so that 
cach correlation may become at once a datum for future research, 
instead of reserving the major correlations until near the end of 
