 Chapter 14 of Essays in Experimental Logic Essays in Experimental Logic by John Dewey The Logic of Judgments of Practice, Science as a Practical Art No one will deny that, as seen from one angle, science is a pursuit, an enterprise, a mode of practice. It is at least that, no matter how much or more else it is. In course of the practice of knowing, distinctive practical judgments will then naturally be made. Especially does this hold good when an intellectual class is developed, when there is a body of persons working at knowing, as another body is working at farming or engineering. Moreover, the instrumentalities of this inquiring class gain an importance for all classes in the degree in which it is realized. That success in the conduct of the practice of farming or engineering or medicine depends upon use of the successes achieved in the business of knowing. The importance of the latter is thrown into relief from another angle, if we consider the enterprises, like diplomacy, politics, and, to a considerable extent, morals, a thorough going and constant dependence upon the practice of science. As Hobbes was wont to say, the advantages of a science of morals are more obvious in the evils which we suffer from its lack. To say that something is to be learned is to be found out, is to be ascertained, or proved, or believed. It is to say that something is to be done. Every such proposition, in the concrete, is a practical proposition. Every such proposition of inquiry, discovery, and testing will have then the traits assigned to the class of practical propositions. They imply an incomplete situation going forward to completion, and the proposition as a specific organ of carrying on the movement. I have not the intention of dwelling at length upon this theme. I wish to raise, in as definite and emphatic a way as possible, a certain question. Suppose that the propositions arising within the practice of knowing and functioning as agencies in its conduct could be shown to present all the distinctions and relations characteristic of the subject matter of logic. What would be the conclusion? To an unbiased mind, the question probably answers itself. All purely logical terms and propositions fall within the scope of the class of propositions of inquiry, as a special form of propositions of practice. My further remarks are not aimed at proving that the case accords with the hypothesis propounded, but are intended to procure hospitality for the hypothesis. If thinking is the art by which knowledge is practiced, then the materials with which thinking deals may be supposed, by analogy with the other arts, to take on in consequence special shapes. The man who is making a boat will give wood a form, which it did not have, in order that it may serve the purpose to which it is to be put. Thinking may then be supposed to give its material the form, which will make it amenable to its purpose, attaining knowledge, or, as it is ordinarily put, going from the unknown to the known. That physical analysis and synthesis, are included in the processes of investigation of natural objects, makes them a part of the practice of knowing, and it makes any general traits, which result in consequence of such treatment, characters of objects, as they are involved in knowledge-getting. That is to say, if there are any features which natural existences assume, in order that inference may be more fertile and more safe than it would otherwise be, those features correspond to the special traits which would be given to wood in process of constructing a boat. They are manufactured, without being any worse because of it. The question which I raised in the last paragraph may then be restated in this fashion. Are there such features? If there are, are they like those characters which books on logic talk about? Comparison with language may help us. Language, I confine myself for convenience to spoken language, consists of sounds, but it does not consist simply of those sounds which issue from the human organs prior to the attempt to communicate. It has been said that an American baby, before talking, makes almost every sound found in any language, but elimination takes place, and so does intensification. Certain sounds, originally slurred over, are made prominent. The baby has to work for them, and the work is one which he neither undertakes nor accomplishes except under the incitation of others. Language is chiefly marked off, however, by articulation, by the arrangement of what is selected, into an orderly sequence of vowels and consonants that everyone ignores, with certain rules of stress, etc. It may fairly be said that speech is a manufactured article. It consists of natural ebullitions of sound, which have been shaped for the sake of being effective instrumentalities of a purpose. For the most part, the making has gone on under the stress of the necessities of communication with little deliberate control. Works on phonetics, dictionaries, grammars, rhetorics, etc., mark some participation of deliberate intention in the process of manufacture. If we bring written language into the account, we should find the conscious factor extended somewhat. What? Making, shaping for an end? There is, whether with or without, conscious control. Now while there is something in the antecedent properties of sound which enter into the determination of speech, the worth of speech is in no way measured by faithfulness to these antecedent properties. It is measured only by its efficiency and economy in realizing the special results for which it is constructed. Written language need not look like sounds any more than sounds look like objects. It must represent articulate sounds, but faithful representation is wholly a matter of carrying the mind to the same outcome, of exercising the same function, not of resemblance or copying. Original structure limits what may be made out of anything. One cannot, at least at present, make a silk purse out of pig's bristles. But this conditioning relationship is very different from one in which the antecedent existences are a model or prototype to which the consequent must be surveyally faithful. The boatmaker must take account of the grain and strength of his wood. To take account of, to reckon with, is a very different matter however from repetition or literal loyalty. The measure is found in the consequences for which existences are used. I wish, of course, to suggest that logical traits are just features of original existences as they have been worked over for use in inference as the traits of manufactured articles are qualities of crude materials modified for specific purposes. From the whole, past theories have vibrated between treating logical traits as subjective, something resident in mind, mind being thought of as an immaterial or a psychical existence independent of natural things and events, and describing ontological pre-existence to them. Thus far in the history of thought, each method has flourished a while and then called out a reaction to its opposite. The reification, I use the word here without prejudice, of logical traits has taken both an idealistic form because of emphasis upon their spiritual or ideal nature and stuff, and a realistic one due to emphasis upon their immediate apprehension and givenness. That mathematics have been from Plato to Descartes and contemporary analytic realism, the great provocative of realistic idealisms is a familiar fact. The hypothesis here propounded is avaya media. What has been overlooked is the reality and importance of art and its works. The tools and works of art are neither mental, subjective things nor are they antecedent entities like crude or raw material. They are the latter shaped for a purpose. It is impossible to overstate their objectivity from the standpoint of their existence and their efficacy within the operations in question, nor their objectivity in the sense of their dependence upon prior natural existences whose traits have to be taken account of or reckoned with by the operations of art. In the case of the art of inference, the art securely of going from the given to the absent, the dependence of mine upon inference, the fact that wherever inference occurs we have a conscious agent, one who recognizes, plans, invents, seeks out, deliberates, anticipates, and who reacting to anticipations, fears, hates, desires, etc., explains the theories which because of misconception of the nature of mind and consciousness have labeled logical distinctions psychical and subjective. In short, the theory shows why logical features have been made into ontological entities and into mental states. To elaborate this thesis would be to repeat what has been said, in all the essays of this volume, I wish only to call attention to certain considerations which may focus other discussions upon this hypothesis. One, the existence of inference is a fact, a fact as certain and unquestioned as the existence of eyes or ears or the growth of plants or the circulation of the blood. One observes it taking place everywhere where human beings exist. A student of the history of man finds that history is composed of beliefs, institutions, and customs which are inexplicable without acts of inference. This fact of inference is as much a datum, a hard fact for logical theory as any sensory quality whatsoever. It is something men do as they walk, chew, or jump. There is nothing a priori or ideological about it. It is just a brute, empirically observable event. Two, its importance is almost as conspicuous as its existence. Every act of human life, not springing from instinct or mechanical habit, contains it. Most habits are depended upon some amount of it for their formation as they are depended upon it for their re-adaptation to novel circumstances, from the humblest act of daily life to the most intricate calculations of science, and the determination and execution of social, legal, and political policies, things are used as signs, indications, or evidence from which one proceeds to something else, not yet directly given. Three, the act of inferring takes place naturally, that is without intention. It is at first something we do, not something which we need to do. We do it as we breathe, or walk, or gesture. Only after it is done do we notice it and reflect upon it, and the great mass of men no more reflect upon it after its occurrence than they reflect upon the process of walking, and try to discover its conditions and mechanism. That an individual, an animal organism, a man or a woman, performs the act is to say something capable of direct proof through appeal to observation, to say that something called mind or consciousness does, it is itself to employ inference and dubious inference. The fact of inference is much sureer, in other words, than that of a particular inference, such as that to something called reason or consciousness in connection with it. Save as mind is, but another word for the fact of inference, in which case of course it cannot be re-referred to as its cause, source, or author. Moreover, by all principles of science, inference cannot be referred to mind or consciousness as its condition, unless there is independent proof of the existence of that mind to which it is referred. Prima-fasci we are conscious or aware of inference, precisely as we are of anything else, not by introspection of something within the very consciousness which is supposed to be its source, but by observation of something taking place in the world, as we are conscious of walking after we have walked, after it has been done naturally or unconsciously, it may be done consciously, that is, with intent or on purpose, but this means that it is done with consciousness, whatever consciousness may be discovered to mean, not that it is done by consciousness. Now, if other natural events, characteristic only, so far as can be ascertained, of highly organized beings, are marked by unique or by distinctive traits, there is good ground for the assumption that inference will be so marked, as we do not find the circulation of blood or the stimulation of nerves in a stone, and as we expect as a matter of course to find peculiar conditions, qualities, and consequences in the being where such operations occur, so do we not find the act of inference in a stone, and we expect peculiar conditions, qualities, and consequences in whatever beings perform the act, unless in other words, all of the ordinary canons of inquiry are suspended, inference is not an isolated nor a merely formal event, as against the latter, it has its own distinctive structure and properties, as against the former, it has specific generating conditions and specific results. Four. Possibly all this seems too obvious for a mention, but there is often a virtual conspiracy in philosophy, not to mention obvious things, nor to dwell upon them, otherwise remote speculations might be brought to a sudden halt. The point of these common places resides in the push they may give anyone to engage in a search for distinctive features in the act of inference. The search may perhaps be best initiated by noting the seeming inconsistency between what has been said about inference as an art and inference as a natural, unpremeditated occurrence. The obvious function of spontaneous inference is to bring before an agent absent considerations to which he may respond as he otherwise responds to the stimulating force of the given situation. To infer rain is to enable one to behave now as given conditions would not otherwise enable him to conduct himself. This instigation to behave toward the remote in space or time is the primary trait of the inferential act. Descriptively speaking, the act consists in taking up an attitude of response to an absent thing as if it were present. But just because the thing is absent, the attitude taken may be either irrelevant and positively harmful or extremely pertinent and advantageous. We may infer rain when rain is not going to happen, and acting upon the inference be worse off than if there had been no inference. Or we may make preparations which we would not otherwise have made. The rain may come, and the inference saves our lives, as the arc saved Noah. Influence brings, in short, truth and falsity into the world, just as definitely as the circulation of the blood brings its distinctive consequences. Both advantageous and liabilities into the world, or as the existence of banking brings with it, consequences of business extension and of bankruptcy not previously existent. If the reader objects to the introduction of the terms truth and falsity, I am perfectly willing to leave the choice of words to him, provided the fact is recognized that through inference, men are capable of a kind of success and exposed to a kind of failure, but otherwise possible, dependent upon the fact that inference takes absent things as being in a certain real continuum with present things, so that our attitude toward the latter is bound up with our reaction to the former as parts of the same situation. And in any event, I wish to protest against a possible objection to the introduction of the terms false and true. It may be said that inference is not responsible for the occurrence of errors and truths, because these accompany simple apprehensions where there is no inference, as when I see a snake, which isn't there, or any other case which may appear to the objector to afford an illustration of his point, the objection illustrates my point. To affirm a snake is to affirm potentialities going beyond what is actually given. It says that what is given is going to do something, the doing characteristic of a snake, so that we are to react to the given as to a snake, or if we take the case of a face in the cloud, recognized as a fantasy. Then, to say nothing of in the cloud which involves reference beyond the given, fantasy, dream, equally means a reference to objects as considerations not given as the actual datum is given. We have not got very far with our question of distinctive unique traits called into existence by inference, but we have got far enough to have light upon what is called the transcendence of knowledge. All inference is a going beyond the assuredly present to an absent. Hence it is a more or less precarious journey. It is transcending limits of security of immediate response. The stone which reacts only to stimuli of the present, not of the future, cannot make the mistakes which a being reacting to a future taken to be connected with the present is sure to make. But it is important to note just what this transcendence consists in. It has nothing to do with transcending mental states to arrive at an external object. It is behaving to the given situation as evolving something not given. It is Robinson Caruso going from a seen foot to an unseen man, not from a mental state to something unmental. Five. The mistakes and failures resulting from inference constitute the ground for transition from natural spontaneous performance to the technique or deliberate art of inference. There is something humorous about the discussion of the problem of error as if it were a rare or exceptional thing, an anomaly, when the barest glance at human history shows that mistakes have been the rule and the truth lies at the bottom of a well. As to inferences bound up with barely keeping alive, man has had to effect a considerable balance of good guesses over bad. Aside from this somewhat narrow field, the original appearance of inference upon the scene probably added to the interest of life rather than to its efficiency. If the classic definition of man as a rational animal means simply an inferring or guessing animal, it implies to the natural man, for it allows for the guesses being mostly wrong. If it is used with its customary eulogistic connotations, it applies only to man chastened to the use of a hardly one and toilsome art. If it alleges that man has any natural preference for a reasonable inference or that the rationality of an inference is a measure of its hold upon him, it is grotesquely wrong. To propagate this error is to encourage man in his most baleful illusion and to postpone the day of an effective and widespread adoption of a perfected art of knowing. Primarily put, the waste and loss consequent upon the natural happening of inference led man slowly and grudgingly to the adoption of safeguards in its performance. In some part, the scope of which is easily exaggerated. Man has come to attribute many of the ills from which he suffers to his own premature, inept and unguarded performing of inference instead of to fate, bad luck, and accident. In some things, and to some extent in all things, he has invented and perfected an art of inquiry. A system of checks and tests to be used before the conclusion of inference is categorically affirmed. Its nature has been considered in many other places in these pages, but it may prove instructive to restate it in this context. A. Nothing is less adapted to a successful accomplishing of an inference than the subject matter from which it ordinarily fares forth. That subject matter is a nest of obscurities and ambiguities. The ordinary warnings against trusting to imagination, the bad name which has come intellectually to attach to fancy, are evidences that anything may suggest anything. Regarding most of the important happenings in life, no inference has been too extravagant to obtain followers and influence action, because subject matter was so variegated and complex that any objects which it suggested had a prima facie plausibility. That every advance in knowledge has been effected by using agencies which break up a complex subject matter into independent variables from each of which a distinct inference may be drawn, and by attacking each one of these things by every conceivable tool for further resolution so as to make sure we are dealing with something so simple as to be unambiguous, is the report of the history of science. It is sometimes held that knowledge comes ultimately to a necessity of belief or acceptance, which is the equivalent of an incapacity to think otherwise than so-and-so. Well even in the case of such an apparently simple self-evident thing as a red, this inability if it is worth anything, is a residuum from experimental analysis. We do not believe in the thing as red, whenever there is a need of scientific testing, till we have exhausted all kinds of active attack and find the red still resisting and persisting. Ordinarily we move the head, we shade the eyes, we turn the thing over, we take it to a different light. The use of lens, prism, or whatever device is simply carrying farther the use of like methods as of physical resolution. Whatever endures all these active, not mental attacks, we accept, pending invention of more effective weapons. To make sure that a given fact is just and such a shade of red is, one may say, a final triumph of scientific method. To turn around and treat it as something naturally or psychologically given is a monstrous superstition. When assured, such a simple datum is for the sake of guarding the act of inference. Color may mean a lot of things, any red may mean a lot of things. Such things are ambiguous, they afford unreliable evidence or signs. To get the color down to the last touch of possible discrimination is to limit its range of testimony. Ideally it is to secure voice, which says but one thing, and says that unmistakably. Its simplicity is not identical with isolation, but with specified relationship. Thus the hard facts, the brute data, the simple qualities or ideas, the sense of elements of traditional and of contemporary logic, get placed and identified with the art of controlling inference. The ally terms self-evident, sensory truths, simple apprehensions, have their meanings unambiguously determined in the same context, while apart from it they are the source of all kinds of error. They are no longer notions to conjure with. They express the last results attainable by present physical methods of discriminative analysis, employed in the search for dependable data for inference. Improve the physical means of experimentation, improve the microscope or the registering apparatus or the chemical regent, and they may be replaced tomorrow by new, simple apprehensions of simple and ultimate data. B. Natural or spontaneous inference. Depends very largely upon the habits of the individual in whom inferring takes place. These habits depend, in turn, very largely upon the customs of the social group in which he has been brought up. An eclipse suggests very different things according to the rights, ceremonies, legends, traditions, etc. of the group to which the spectator belongs. The average layman in a civilized group may have no more personal science than an Australian Bushman, but the legends which determine his reactions are different. His inference is better. Neither because of superior intellectual capacity, nor because of more careful personal methods of knowing, but because his instruction has been superior. The instruction of a scientific inquirer in the best scientific knowledge of his day is just as much a part of the control or art of inference as is the technique of observational analysis which he uses. As the bulk of prior ascertainments increases, the tendency is to identify this stock of learning, this store of achieved truth with knowledge. There is no objection to this identification save as it leads the logician or epistemologist to ignore that which made it knowledge, that which gives it a right to the title, and as a consequence to fall into two errors. One overlooking its function in the guidance and handling of future inferences, the other confusing the mere act of reference to what is known. Known so far as it has accrued from prior tested inquiries, with knowing. To remind oneself of what is known as to the topic with which I am dealing is an indispensable performance, but to call this reminder knowing, as the preventative realist usually does, is to confuse a psychological event with a logical achievement. It is from misconception of this act of reminding oneself of what is known, as a check in some actual inquiry, that arise most of the fallacies about simple acquaintance, mere apprehension, etc., the fallacies which eliminate inquiry and inferring from knowledge. C. The art of inference gives rise to specific features, characterizing the inferred thing. The natural man reacts to the suggested thing as he would to something present. That is, he tends to accept it uncritically. The man called up by the footprint on the sand is just as real a man as the footprint is a real footprint. It is a man, not the idea of a man, which is indicated. What a thing means is another thing. It doesn't mean a meaning. The only difference is that the thing indicated is farther off, more concealed, and hence probably more mysterious, more powerful, and awesome on that account. The man indicated to Caruso by the footprints was like a man of menacing powers seen at a distance through a telescope. Things naturally inferred are accepted, in other words by the natural man on altogether too realistic a basis for adequate control. They impose themselves too directly and irretrievably. There are no alternatives to save either acceptance or rejection in Toto. What is needed for control is some device by which they can be re-itted, or just what they are, namely inferred objects. Which however assured is objects of prior experiences are uncertain as to their existence in connection with the object, from which present inference sets out. While more careful inspection of the given object to see if it be really a footprint, how fresh, etc., may do much for safeguarding inference, and while forays into whatever else is known may help, there is still need for something else. We need some method of freely examining and handling the object, in its status as an inferred object. This means some way of detaching it, as it were, from the particular act of inference in which it presents itself. Without such detachment Caruso can never get into a free and defective relation with the man indicated by the footprint. He can only, so to speak, go on repeating with continuously increasing fright. There is a man about, there is a man about. The man needs to be treated not as a man, but as something having a merely inferred and hence potential status, as a meaning or thought, or idea. There is a great difference between meaning and a meaning. Meaning is simply a function of the situation. This thing means that thing. Meaning is the relationship. A meaning is something quite different. It is not a function, but of specific entity, a peculiar thing, namely the man as suggested. Words are the great instrument of translating the relation of inference existing between two things, into a new kind of thing which can be operated with on its own account. The term of discourse or reflection is the solution of the requirement for greater flexibility and liberation. Let me repeat. Caruso's inquiry can play freely around and about the man inferred from the footprint only as he can, so to say, get away from the immediate suggestive force of the footprint. As it originally stands, the man suggested is on the same coercive level as the suggestive footprint. They are related, tied together, but a gesture, a sound, may be used as a substitute for the thing inferred. It exists independently of the footprint and may therefore be thought about and ideally experimented with, irrespective of the footprint. It at once preserves the meaning force of the situation and attaches it from the immediacy of the situation. It is a meaning, an idea. Here we have, I submit, the explanation of notions, forms, essences, terms, subsistences, ideas, meanings, etc. They are surrogates of the objects of inference, of such a character that they may be elaborated and manipulated exactly as primary things may be, so far as inference is concerned. They can be brought into relation with one another, quite irrespective of the things which originally suggested them. Without such free play, reflective inquiry is mockery and control of inference and impossibility. When a speck of light suggests to an astronomer a comet, he would have nothing to do but either to accept the inferred object as a real one or to reject it as a mere fancy, unless he could treat comet for the time being not as a thing at all, but as a meaning, a conception. A meaning having moreover by connection with other meanings, implications, meanings consequent from it. Unless a meaning is an inferred object, detached and fixed as a term capable of independent development, what sort of ghostly being is it? Except on the basis stated, what is the transition from the function of meaning to a meaning as an entity in reasoning? And once more, unless there is such a transition, is reasoning possible? Cats have claws and teeth and fur. They do not have implications. No physical thing has implications. The term cat has implications. How can this difference be explained? On the ground that we cannot use the cat object, inferred from given indications in such a way as will test the inference and make it fruitful, helpful, unless we can detach it from the existential dependence upon the particular things which suggested. We need to know what a cat would be if it were there. What other things would also be indicated if the cat is really indicated? We therefore create a new object. We take something to stand for the cat in its status as inferred in contrast with the cat as a live thing. A sound or a visible mark is the ordinary mechanism for producing such a new object. Whatever the physical means employed, we now have a new object, a term, a meaning, a notion, an essence, a form, or species, according to the terminology which may be in vogue. It is as much a specific existence as any sound or mark is, but it is a mark which notes, concentrates, and records an outcome of an inference which is not yet accepted and affirmed. That is to say, it designates an object which is not yet to be reacted to as one reacts to the given stimulus, but which is an object of further examination and inquiry. A medium of a postponed conclusion and of investigation continued till better grounds for affirming an object, making a definite unified response, are given. A term is an object so far as that object is undergoing shaping in a directed act of inquiry. It may be called a possible object or a hypothetical object. Such objects do not walk or bite or scratch, but they are nevertheless actually present as the vital agencies of reflection. If we but forget where they live and operate within the event of controlled inference, we have on our hands all the mysteries of the double world of existence and essence, particular and universal, thing and idea, ordinary life and science. For the world of science, especially of mathematical science, is the world of considerations which have approved themselves to be effectively regulative of the operations of inference. It is easier to wash with ordinary water than with H2O, and there is a market difference between falling off a building and one half GT squared, but H2O and one half GT squared are as potent for the distinctive act of inference. As genuine and distinctive enact as washing the hands or rolling down hell, as ordinary water and falling are impotent, scientific men can handle these things of inference, precisely as the blacksmith handles his tools. They are not thoughts as they are ordinarily used, not even in the logical sense of thought. They are rather things whose manipulation, as the blacksmith manipulates his tools, yield knowledge or methods of knowledge, with a minimum of recourse to thinking and a maximum of efficiency. When one considers the importance of the enterprise of knowledge, it is not surprising that appropriate tools have been devised for carrying it on, and that these tools have no prototypes in pre-existent materials. They are real objects, but they are just the real objects which they are, and not some other objects. End of section 19. Chapter 14 of Essays and Experimental Logic. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Franklin Vias. Essays and Experimental Logic by John Dewey. The logic of judgments of practice, theory, and practice. Our last paragraphs have touched upon the nature of science. They contain, by way of intimation, an explanation of the distance which lies between the things of daily intercourse and the terms of science. Controlled inference is science, and science is, accordingly, a highly specialized industry. It is such a specialized mode of practice that it does not appear to be a mode of practice at all. This high specialization is part of the reason for the current antithesis of theory and practice, knowledge and conduct. The other part being the survival of the ancient conception of knowledge as intuitive and dialectical, the conception which is set forth in the Aristotelian logic. Starting from the hypothesis that the art of controlled inference requires for its efficient exercise, especially adapted entities, it follows that the various sciences are the various forms which the industry of controlled inquiry assumes. It follows that the conceptions and formulations of the sciences, physical and mathematical, concerned things which have been reshaped in view of the exigencies of regulated and fertile inference. To get things into the estate where such inference is practicable, many qualities of the water and air, cats and dogs, stones and stars of daily intercourse with the world have been dropped or depressed, much that was trivial or remote has been elevated and exaggerated. Neither the omissions nor the accentuations are arbitrary. They are purposeful. They represent the changes in the things of ordinary life which are needed to safeguard the important business of inference. There is then a great difference between the entities of science and the things of daily life. This may be fully acknowledged, but unless the admission is accompanied by an ignoring of the function of inference, it creates no problem of conciliation, no need of apologizing for either one or the other. It generates no problem of the real and the apparent. The real or true objects of science are those which best fulfill the demands of secure and fertile inference. To arrive at them is such a difficult operation. There are so many suspicious candidates clamoring for the office that is no wonder that when the objects suitable for inference are constituted, they tend to impose themselves as the real objects in comparison with which the things of ordinary life are but impressions made upon us. According to such modern thought are defective samples of being according to much of ancient thought. But one has only to note that their genuinely characteristic feature is fitness for the aims of inference to awaken from the nightmare of all such problems. They differ from the things of the common world of action and association as the means and ends of one occupation differ from those of another. The difference is not that which exists between reality and appearance but is that between the subject matter of crude occupations and of a highly specialized and difficult art upon the success of which so it is discovered the progress of other occupations ultimately depends. The entities of science are not only from the scientist, they are also for him. They express that is not only the outcome of reflective increase but express them in the particular form in which they can enter most directly and efficiently into subsequent inquiries. The fact that they are sustained within the universe of inquiry accounts for their remoteness from the things of daily life, the latter being promptly precipitated out of suspense in such solutions. That most of the immediate qualities of things including the so called secondary qualities are dropped specifies that such qualities have not turned out to be fruitful for inference. That mathematical, mechanical and primary distinctions and relations have come to constitute the proper subject matter of science signifies that they represent such qualities of original things as are most manipular for knowledge getting or assured an extensive inference. Consider what a hard time the scientific man had in getting away from other qualities and how the more immediate qualities have been pressed upon him from all quarters. And it is not surprising that he inclines to think of the intellectually useful properties as alone real and to relegate all others to a quasi illusory field. But his victory is now sufficiently achieved so that this tension may well relax. It may be acknowledged that the difference between scientific entities and ordinary things is one of function, the former being selected and arranged for the successful conduct of inferential knowings. I conclude with an attempt to show how bootless the ordinary antithesis between knowledge or theory and practice becomes when we recognize that it is really involves only a contrast between the kinds of judgments appropriate to ordinary modes of practice and those appropriate to the specialized category of knowledge getting. It is not true that to insist that scientific propositions fall within the domain of practice is to depreciate them. On its face, the insistence means simply that all knowledge involves experimentation with whatever appliances are suited to the problem in hand of an active and physical type. Instead of this doctrine leading to a low estimate of knowledge, the contrary is the case. This art of instrumental thinking turns out to give a key to the control and development of other modes of practice. I have touched elsewhere in these essays upon the way in which knowledge is the instrument of regulation of our human undertakings and I have also pointed out that intrinsic increments of meaning accrue in consequence of thinking. I wish here to point how that mode of practice which is called theorizing emancipates experience how it makes for steady progress. No matter how much the specialist skill improves, we are restricted in the degree in which our ends remain constant or fixed. Significant progress progress which is more than technical depends upon ability to foresee new and different results and to arrange conditions for their affictuation. Science is the instrument of increasing our technique in attaining results already known and cherished. Even more important yet, it is the method of emancipating us from enslavement to costumer ends, the ends established in the past. Let me borrow from political philosophy a kind of caricature of the facts. As social philosophers used to say that the state came into existence when individuals agreed to surrender some of their native personal rights for the sake of getting the advantages of non-interference and aid from others who made a like surrender. So we might say that science began when men gave up the claim to form the structure of knowledge each from himself as a center and measure of meaning when there was an agreement to take an impersonal standpoint. Non-scientific modes of practice left to their natural growth represent in other words arrangements of objects which cluster about the self and which are closely tied down to the habits of the self. Science or theory means a system of objects detached from any particular personal standpoint and therefore available for any and every possible personal standpoint. Even the exigencies of ordinary social life require a slight amount of such detachment or obstruction. I must neglect my own peculiar ends enough to take some account of my neighbor if I am going to be intelligible to him. I must at least find common ground. Science systematizes and indefinitely extends this principle. It takes its stand not with what is common with some particular neighbor living at this special date in this particular village but with any possible neighbor in the wide stretches of time and space and it does so by the mere fact that it is continually reshaping its peculiar objects with an eye single to availability of inference. The more abstract, the more personal, the more impartially objective are its objects. The greater the variety and scope of inference made possible. Every street of experience which is laid out by science has its tracks for transportation and every line issues transfer checks to every other line. You and I may keep running in certain particular routes but conditions are provided for somebody else to foresee or infer new combinations and new results. The depersonalizing of the things of everyday practice becomes the chief agency of their repersonalizing in new and more fruitful modes of practice. The paradox of theory and practice is that theory is with respect to all other modes of practice, the most practical of all things and the more impartial and impersonal it is the more truly practical it is and this is the soul paradox. But lest the man of science, the man of directly reflective habits be puffed up with his own conceits, he must bear in mind that practical application that is experiment is a condition of his own calling that it is indispensable to the institution of knowledge or truth. Consequently in order that he keep his own balance it is needed that his findings be everywhere applied. The more their application is confined within his own special calling the less meaning do the perceptions possess and the more exposed they are to error. The widest possible range of application is the means of the deepest verification as long as the specialist hugs his own results they are vague in meaning and unsafe in content. That individuals in every branch of human endeavor should be experimentalists. Engaged in testing the findings of the theorist is the soul's final guarantee for the sanity of the theorist. End of section 20 recording by Franklin Vies. End of essays in experimental logic by John Dewey.