CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 269 



values. It means that philosophy be a method; 

 not an assurance company, nor a knight errant. 

 It means an alignment with science. Philosophy 

 may not be sacrificed to the partial and superficial 

 clamor of that which sometimes officiously and pre 

 tentiously exhibits itself as Science. But there is 

 a sense in which philosophy must go to school to 

 the sciences; must have no data save such as it 

 receives at their hands ; and be hospitable to no 

 method of inquiry or reflection not akin to those in 

 daily use among the sciences. As long as it claims 

 for itself special territory of fact, or peculiar 

 modes of access to truth, so long must it occupy a 

 dubious position. Yet this claim it has to make 

 until psychology comes to its own. There is some 

 thing in experience, something in things, which the 

 physical and the biological sciences do not touch; 

 something, moreover, which is not just more ex 

 periences or more existences; but without which 

 their materials are inexperienced, unrealized. Such 

 sciences deal only with what might be experienced ; 

 with the content of experience, provided and as 

 sumed there be experience. It is psychology which 

 tells us how this possible experience loses its barely 

 hypothetical character, and is stamped with cate 

 gorical unquestioned experiencedness ; how, in a 

 word, it becomes here and now in some uniquely 

 individualized life. Here is the necessary transi 

 tion of science into philosophy; a passage that 



