SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 101 



fact the whole lot of them form what is known in logic 

 as 'a universe of discourse.' To form a universe of 

 discourse argues, as this example shows, no further kind 

 of connexion. The importance attached by certain monistic 

 writers to the fact that any chaos may become a universe 

 by merely being named, is to me incomprehensible." 

 We are thus left with two kinds of unity in the experienced 

 world ; the one what we may call the epistemological 

 unity, due merely to the fact that my experienced world 

 is what one experience selects from the sum total of 

 existence ; the other that tentative and partial unity 

 exhibited in the prevalence of scientific laws in those 

 portions of the world which science has hitherto mastered. 

 Now a generalisation based upon either of these kinds of 

 unity would be fallacious. That the things which we 

 experience have the common property of being ex- 

 perienced by us is a truism from which obviously nothing 

 of importance can be deducible : it is clearly fallacious 

 to draw from the fact that whatever we experience is 

 experienced the conclusion that therefore everything 

 must be experienced. The generalisation of the second 

 kind of unity, namely, that derived from scientific laws, 

 would be equally fallacious, though the fallacy is a trifle 

 less elementary. In order to explain it let us consider 

 for a moment what is called the reign of law. People 

 often speak as though it were a remarkable fact that the 

 physical world is subject to invariable laws. In fact, 

 however, it is not easy to see how such a world could 

 fail to obey general laws. Taking any arbitrary set 

 of points in space, there is a function of the time corre- 

 sponding to these points, i.e. expressing the motion of a 

 particle which traverses these points : this function may 

 be regarded as a general law to which the behaviour of 

 such a particle is subject. Taking all such functions for 



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