140 THE AIM AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD. 



with such and such a rolling gait are sailors," in the same way 

 as the latter is, to " all things that have such and such 

 properties are copper sulphate." Both these assert a " per- 

 manent connection of qualities in the Real " that is, are the 

 final products of a process in which primary facts have been 

 unified, systematised, or made intelligible by a concept which 

 has not failed to lead to discoveries of fresh primary facts 

 without limit in its province. 



To this argument one very obvious answer suggests itself. 

 If the judgment " that man is a sailor " is to be describecKas 

 a secondary construction upon a basis of primary or presented 

 fact, because in the mind of the observer a synthesis of this 

 basis with non-presented elements occurs, how can the same 

 term be withheld from the judgment " that man has a rolling 

 gait " ? Surely (it may be maintained) the application to a 

 certain complex of presented elements of the term m an 

 implies the erection on the basis of that complex of a secondary 

 construction into which a multitude of non-presented elements 

 enters. The idea man is itself, in fact, nothing but an 

 hypothesis whose function is to render the primary data 

 intelligible ; for it contains a reference to an immense body 

 of 'spatio-temporal experiences homogeneous with the given 

 material. 



I venture to doubt whether this argument is really as 

 strong as it is generally assumed to be. Granting that, as 

 modern theories of perception teach, the primary data are 

 " complicated " by references to non-presented material, and 

 that tha secondary construction gives the presented object its 

 meaning, it seems possible, yet, to maintain that in the 

 common-sense judgment the essential feature is an act of 

 analysis or discrimination, and that the secondary non- 

 presented elements are confined in the main to the function 

 of supplying a motive for this discrimination. On this view 

 the term "man," when it appears in a common-sense judgment,, 

 connotes merely a number of presented facts very largely 



