4 - Scientific experience

Summary

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to consider the nature of scientific experience from the standpoint of the totality of experience. The world of science, I take it, is a world of experience, and is consequently the world of reality. In all experience, we have seen, there is an assertion of reality. And we have seen also that no experience is a mere part or department of the real world; reality has no parts in this sense, and everything asserted of reality is asserted of it as a whole. Further, science, because it is experience, is a world of ideas, and contains a specific and homogeneous assertion of reality. And my business is to discover the explicit character of this world of ideas, the explicit content of the assertion of reality contained in scientific experience, for the character of science from the standpoint of the totality of experience lies in the character of this world of ideas as a whole and in the adequacy of its assertion of reality.

‘Natural history’, a kind of semi-detached observation of uniformities in the world of perception, may be taken to be the point at which scientific thought springs from the main stem of experience; and the desire which prompts it is for an escape from the private, incommunicable world of personal experience as such, into a world of common and communicable experience, a world of experience upon which universal agreement is possible. The entire history of science may be seen as a pathetic attempt to find, in the face of incredible difficulties, a world of definite and demonstrable experience, one free from merely personal associations and independent of the idiosyncrasies of particular observers, an absolutely impersonal and stable world. The sole explicit criterion of scientific ideas is their absolute communicability.

Now, that natural history itself will not itself provide us with a world of experience of this kind is clear enough. The mere attribution of a common name to what is given in perception, even when perception is freed so far as possible from merely personal associations, will give only a small degree of communicability, of stability to our experience. Every science has started upon its career as a kind of natural history, but every science has discovered the necessity of passing beyond the world of experience which a natural history gives if it is to satisfy its explicit purpose.