?SCt TIUNSAOTTONS OF SEf'TTON A. 



tlie rpl<=>vaiit ideas. By a tliporist I do not mean a man wlin is np in tlie clouds, 

 but a man whose motive for thought is tlie desire to formulate correctly the 

 rules according to which events occur. A f?uccessful theorist should be exces- 

 sively interested in immediate events, otherwise he is not at all likelj' to 

 formulate correctly anj'thing a]>out them. Of course, both sources of science 

 exist in all men. 



Now, what is this thought organisation which we call science? The first 

 aspect of modem science which struck thoughtful observers was its inductive 

 character. The nature of induction, its importance, and the rules of inductive 

 logic have been considered by a long series of thinkers, especially English 

 thinkers, Bacon, Herschel, J. S. Mill, Venn, Jevoiis, and others. I am not 

 going to plunge into an analysis of the process of induction. Induction is the 

 machinery and not the product, and it is the product which I want to consider. 

 When we understand the product we shall be in a stronger position to improve 

 the machinery. 



First, there is one point which it is necessary to emphasise. There is a 

 tendency in analysing scientific processes to assume a given assemblage of con- 

 cept.s applying to nature, and to imagine that the discovery of laws of nature 

 consists in selecting by means of inductive logic some one out of a definite set 

 of possible alternative relations which may hold between the things in nature 

 answering to these obvious concepts. In a sense tliis assumption is fairly 

 correct, especially in regard to the earlier .stages of science. Mankind founil 

 itself in possession of certain concepts respecting nature — for example, the 

 concept of fairly permnnent material ))odie.s — and proceeded to determine laws 

 whicli related the corresponding percepts in natnre. I'.ut the foiTnulation of 

 laws changed the concepts, sometimes gently by an added precision, sometimes 

 violently. At first this process was not much noticed, or at least was felt to be 

 a process curbed within narrow bounds, not touching fundamental ideas. At 

 the stage whei'e we now are, the formulation of the concejits can be seen to Ije 

 as important as the formulation of the empirical laws connecting the events in 

 the universe as thus conceived by us. For example, the concepts of life, of 

 iieredity, of <a material body, of a molecule, of an atom, of an electron, of 

 energy, of space, of time, of quantity, and of number. I am not dogmatising 

 about the best way of getting such ideas straight. Certainly it will only be 

 done by those who have devoted themselves to a .specinl study of the facts in 

 question. Success is never absolute, and progress in the right direction is the 

 result of a slow, gradual process of continual comparison of ideas with facts. 

 Tlie criterion of success is that we should be able to formulate empirical laws, 

 that is, statements of relations, connecting the various parts of the universe as 

 thus conceived, laws with the property that we can interpret the actual events 

 of our lives as being our fragmentary knowledge of this cniiceived interrelated 

 whole. 



But, for the purposes of science, what is the actual world? Has science to 

 wait for the termination of the metaphysical debate till it can determine its own 

 subject-matter? I suggest tliat science has a much more homely starting- 

 ground. Its task is the discovery of the relations which e.xi^t within that flux 

 of perc-eptions, sensations, and emotions which forms our experience of life. 

 The panorama yielded by sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, and by more inchoate 

 sensible feelings, is the sole field of its activity. It is in this way that science 

 is the thought organisation of experience. The most obvious aspect of this field 

 of actual experience is its disorderly character. It is for each person a 

 (■antinuum, fragmentary, and with elements not clearly differentiated. The 

 comparison of the sensible experiences of diverse people brings its own diffi- 

 culties. I insi.st on the radically untidy, ill-ad ju.sted character" of the fields of 

 actual experience from ivliich science starts. To grasp this fundamental truth 

 is the first- step in wisdom, when constructing a philosophy of science. This fact 

 is concealed by the influence of language, moulded by science, which foists on 

 us exact concepts as though they represented the immediate deliverances of 

 experience. The result is that we imagine that we have immediate experience 

 of a world of perfectly defined objects implicated in perfectly defined events 

 which, as known to us by the direct deliverance of our senses, happen at exact 

 instants of time, in a .space formed by exact. points, without parts and without 



