SCIENCE AND DEMONSTRATION 223 



from which it abstracted the data for these relations exist in conformity with 

 these relations, granted that as a fact they exist : but that such things must 

 exist by any necessity arising from thinking them in the abstract, is utterly un 

 warranted and untrue. The reality of the phenomena revealed to us in sense 

 experience as constituting the physical universe does not contain or show forth 

 any absolute necessity for its existence as a concrete system ; though it gives 

 rise to a hypothetical necessity in the relations by which we conceive it in the 

 abstract. The intellect derives from sense experience, by the process of ab 

 straction, the (abstract) elements which it compares. From the fact that those 

 elements are apprehended by the intellect in the abstract free from their 

 conditions of concrete existence in time and space as phenomena of sense 

 experience, the relations between them, logical, mathematical, and metaphysi 

 cal, are. likewise apprehended as fixed, static, unchangeable. But, while we 

 can understand that those necessary and universal relations apply to reality 

 as thought of in the abstract by the intellect, that is, to the elements abstracted 

 from sense experience, we must also remember that the intellect can discern, 

 between those same elements as given in sense experience, other relations 

 not logical, or metaphysical, or mathematical, but physical relations that 

 are not necessary in the sense that any modification of them would be un 

 thinkable, but which are stable, nevertheless, and permanent, in the hypo 

 thesis and in the measure that certain influences, to which their concrete exist 

 ence in time and space is subject, will not interfere with these relations. 



There is no need to dwell any longer here on the erroneous conceptualism 

 of Hegelian idealists regarding the relations between thought and reality, 

 between abstract and concrete, between the object of the intellect and the ob 

 ject of sense. Nor is it necessary to do more than merely indicate that the 

 only satisfactory way of grasping and reconciling the terms of those relations 

 is to be fourd in the Scholastic doctrine of Moderate Realism : The object of 

 the intellect, while it is apprehended formally as abstract and universal only 

 by the intellect, is nevertheless really and fundamentally present and inherent 

 in the concrete object of sense : &quot; Universale est formaliter in mente et 

 fundamentaliter in re &quot; : &quot; The universal exists formally as such only in the 

 intellect but it has a foundation in the thing (of sense experience) &quot;, J 



251. ARISTOTLE S IDEAL OF &quot; SCIENTIFIC &quot; KNOWLEDGE. 

 We have frequently referred already to discussions as to the nature 

 and grounds of the &quot;necessity&quot; attaching to scientific truths or 

 laws, and to the distinction between abstract, necessary truth and 

 concrete, contingent fact (cf. 220, 223). Those inquiries natur 

 ally lead up to the question : What, then, is the ideally perfect 

 form to which our knowledge, our interpretation of universal ex 

 perience, aims, or should aim, at attaining? This problem 

 involves an analysis of many fundamental logical concepts 

 especially those of Deduction, Induction, Demonstration, Explanation, 

 and Science and may, indeed, be regarded as the &quot; most difficult 



1 Cf. JOYCE, Principles of Logic, pp. 132-6, supra, pp. 107-8. 



