Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/611

No. 6.] and so on. It is true that so many tunnels have now been built for similar ends and under substantially like circumstances, that the example errs on the side efof [sic] excessive mechanicalness; but we have only to imagine the tunnel building under untried special conditions, as, say, the recent engineering below the St. Clair River, to get a fair case. Now in such a case it is requisite that science, that theory, be available at every step of the undertaking, and this in the most detailed way. Every stage of the proceeding must, indeed, be absolutely controlled by scientific method. There is here the same apparent contradiction as in the moral case; and yet the solution in the case of the engineering feat is obvious. Theory is used, not as a set of fixed rules to lay down certain things to be done, but as a tool of analysis to help determine what the nature of the special case is; it is used to uncover the reality, the conditions of the matter, and thus to lay bare the circumstances which action has to meet, to synthesize. The mathematical, the mechanical, the geological theory do not say "Do this or that"; but in effect they do say, use me and you will reduce the complex conditions of which you have only some slight idea to an ordered group of relations to which action may easily adjust itself in the desired fashion. Now these conceptions of mechanics, of geology, which aid in determining the special facts at hand, are themselves, it is to be noticed, simply the generic statement of these same facts; the mathematics are the most general statement of any group of circumstances to be met anywhere in experience; the geology is a general statement of the conditions to be met with wherever it is an affair of the soil and so on. The theory, in other words, is not a something or other belonging to an entirely different realm from the special facts to be mastered. It is an outline statement of these same facts wrought out from previous like experiences and existing ready at hand to anticipate, and thus help solve, any particular experience. What we have then in this application of theory to the special case, with all its wealth of concrete detail, is the attack and reduction of a specific reality through the use of a general precedent idea of this same reality. Or what we have, putting it from the side of