160 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



floundered in a morass of contradictions and confusions, 

 mathematics at a somewhat later stage came to the rescue 

 with the theory of Probabilities, and modern science relies 

 on statistical evidence, on the one hand, for the first intro- 

 duction of order into newly reclaimed territory, on the 

 other for the correction or verification of its calculations 

 from hypothetical principles. Scientific induction, calcula- 

 tion from hypothesis, and statistical verification are thus 

 the characteristic methods of modern science, and all are 

 governed by the principle that truth is to be found where 

 results coincide the principle of Consilience, which under- 

 lies all modern methodology. To this it must be added 

 that from the invention of the microscope and telescope 

 onwards there has been a parallel extension of the world of 

 observation itself. Outer experience no longer means the 

 world of the unaided senses. It is a supersensible world, 

 and in as far as chemical and other experiments enable us 

 to see in laboratories that which common experience never 

 reveals it is also a supernormal world. It is a world whose 

 data ramify in all directions far beyond the experience of 

 common sense. 



4. The problem of modern science in its most general 

 terms has been commonly stated as the ascertainment 

 of the laws or general relations of coexistence and sequence 

 among phenomena. The term phenomena suggests meta- 

 physical implications which are open to criticism. But 

 if we overlook these for the moment we may take 

 the formula as a statement of the problem of know- 

 ledge in its simplest terms, viz. as a correlation of the 

 elements of experience. Now many relations are given in 

 experience, and the function of thought is to use these as 

 data for the discovery of further relations which are not 

 and perhaps cannot be given. On the basis of the given 

 relations thought builds up the conception of a reality 

 continuous with but extending indefinitely beyond experi- 

 ence, containing and explaining the order of experience as 

 a part of itself. It is in this sense that the function of 

 thought is the correlation of empirical data, and this func- 

 tion is primary, that is to say something that thought 



