THE AIM AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD. 141 



visual facts. If Madame Tussaud can frame of wax and paint 

 so cunning a counterfeit that the country cousin commits 

 himself to the judgment " there is a policeman " and proceeds 

 to act upon it, we have a case in which complication has 

 followed with, perhaps, excusable haste upon an imperfect 

 discrimination of the data. When the counterfeit fails to 

 react to a question after the manner of genuine policemen, 

 more careful discrimination at once takes place and reveals 

 the absence of some essential visual elements of the complex 

 to which the name " man " is assigned, or the presence of others 

 which are incompatible with that complex. 



This account must be qualified by the admission that very 

 often it is impossible to tell from the form of the judgment 

 whether it is of the common-sense type or the scientific. 

 Hearing a certain peculiar cough and a certain shuffling step 

 in the hall I flee incontinently from X, whose long-winded 

 stories are the bane of the club. Here my action may follow 

 upon a scientific judgment. The complication, instead of 

 serving as the motive for a more careful inspection of the 

 data, leads to the formation and acceptance of a secondary 

 construction based upon those data. It is, on the whole, more 

 " economical " to act upon this construction than to wait until 

 so much of the Objective complex is presented as will render 

 discrimination on the common-sense level possible. Thus 

 while in a given case the judgment which follows upon the 

 presentation of the given primary facts may "Belong to either 

 of the two types distinguished, and the occasions upon which 

 the reaction upon the presentations takes the one form or the 

 other are not separated by any clear intrinsic difference, yet 

 the judgments themselves are so essentially different that we 

 are justified in denying to them the continuity which the 

 pragmatic theory of knowledge seems to demand. And tha 

 difference for which we have found it necessary to contend at 

 the level of scientific hypotheses of our first class is so plainly 

 recognisable at the level of hypotheses of the third class that 



