March 10, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



251 



simple even if they are not so in reality will 

 be more easily brought about again by chance." 



It is upon this conception that a practical 

 science of organized knowledge on any subject 

 must rest. Simple facts are the ground work 

 of sound reason or the common sense of every- 

 day questions; facts which are known to recur 

 with regularity, particularly such as are in the 

 form of statistics "systematized numerical facts 

 collectively" considered and which form the 

 basis of judgments concerned with forecasting 

 the future more or less in conformity to the 

 principle of or the law of probability. This 

 has been defined as "the ratio of chances favor- 

 ing an event to the total number of chances 

 for and against it." Obviously no sound judg- 

 ment involving the future can be arrived at 

 without a knowledge of what has taken place 

 in the past, and yet an immense number of 

 opinions are rendered in total disregard of the 

 lessons of past experience. But as M. Poin- 

 care observes, "although it is with regular facts 

 that thought ought to begin, as soon as the 

 rule is well established, as soon as it is no 

 longer in doubt, the facts which are in com- 

 plete conformity with it lose their interest, 

 since they can teach us nothing new." Thus, 

 while on the one hand the lessons of experience 

 are only too often ignored or set aside, there 

 is on the other frequent failure to recognize the 

 limitations of experience and to scorn the "ex- 

 ception which becomes important." 



The foregoing brief exposition of certain 

 principles of science applied to the systematic 

 collection of facts in the accepted sense will 

 serve the purpose of emphasizing that in its 

 final analysis all fact gathering, fact arrange- 

 ment, and fact comparison has for its pri- 

 mary objective the approximate certainty of the 

 truth in its application to the needs of every- 

 day life. At least in this sense my own efforts 

 have been construed not upon a well-defined 

 theory but in coincident adaptation to my 

 needs, strongly influenced by the profound 

 conviction that only the broadest understand- 

 ing of any given subject is likely to prove 

 trustworthy, that all collateral or related facts 

 must be taken into account, that the knowledge 

 must be sufficient in quantity as well as ex- 



tended in point of time while absolutely free 

 in its gathering from any bias or prejudice. 



The procedure of fact gathering is much more 

 arduous than is assumed by amateurs satis- 

 fied with the collection of mere information 

 and the mechanical indexing of data divorced 

 from practical use. In my judgment it is of 

 the very first importance that the fact gather- 

 er should be the fact user, or, in other words, 

 the one to apply the results of his research 

 to the solution of the problems of every-day 

 life. Nothing is more likely to be harmful 

 than when the fact gathering is done mech- 

 anically or without a definite objective. 



The organization of knowledge, in its final 

 analysis, is concerned with the task of assem- 

 bling the facts of human experience in a form 

 conveniently available and adaptable to every- 

 day needs. In brief, the very purpose of or- 

 ganization and classification is to bring order 

 out of chaos, and yet, in the words of Bou- 

 troux, "In the reality of things, the right 

 eternal, mathematical order which science con- 

 siders from its own point of view serves to ob- 

 scure an order that is invisible, subtle, supple 

 and untrammeled and therefore all the more 

 beautiful." But mankind can not do without 

 the latter any more than the former and it is 

 therefore of the utmost importance that the 

 knowledge organized or arranged and classified 

 shall be as nearly as possible complete or in- 

 clusive of all the experience that has been had 

 in a given matter. For as further observed 

 by Boutroux, "It is beyond dispute that our 

 reasonings are susceptible to being in harmony 

 with facts," for "when they are out of harmony 

 we do not consider that reasoning is a con- 

 scious instrument but rather that we have in- 

 sufficient data, that our field of opportunity 

 is too limited." Hence the supreme need of a 

 clear grasp of the methods of inductive reason- 

 ing as opposed to those of deductive logic, 

 since the former is based on experience while 

 the latter is not. 



The practical ideal of good judgment in mat- 

 ters of our every-day living needs is expressed 

 by Spedding, the biographer of Bacon, in the 

 words "I doubt whether there was ever any man 

 whose evidence upon matters of fact may be 



