No. 559] DOCTRINES HELD AS VITALISM 393 



would be." 10 Or, since all " conditions, " so far as we can 

 deal with them, are experiences, what science tries to 

 formulate reduces to propositions of the following form: 



"When you have such and such experiences, you will 

 have such and such other experiences." 11 



Thus science is a process of getting varied experiences, 

 including the experience of discovering how diverse ex- 

 periences are interconnected, and of formulating these 

 experiences, particularly the interconnections. 



20. Generalizations, laws, are formulations, of the 

 sort characterized above, that cover many experiences or 

 things at once. The possibility of generalizations de- 

 pends upon the fact that things which differ in some re- 

 spects may be (or act) alike in other respects. This is 

 what makes science as a system possible. Everything 

 distinguishable is unique in some respect; otherwise, it 

 would not be distinguishable; it differs at least in place 

 or in time, and so in its relation to the rest of the config- 

 uration of the universe, from everything else. But it is 

 found that certain of the differences between things do 

 not affect certain of their properties or actions, so that 

 we do find uniformities in nature. The study of how 

 things or processes are determined is largely a study of 

 what antecedent differences do, what do not, alter the 

 particular succeeding difference in which we are inter- 

 ested; or just what succeeding differences they do make. 

 But whether a given diversity does affect a given prop- 

 erty or action is determinable, in the first instance, only 



21. Interruption of the Exposition in Order to Make 

 the Application of this Point to Certain Doctrines Pro- 

 posed as Vitalistic. — The fact that two things which dif- 

 fer in some respects act alike in some respects is cer- 

 tainly nothing peculiar to living things. On this ground 

 I can not see anything vitalistic in any sense, in one of 



