Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/343

329 predetermined, not the effects. The immediate problem, at least, is not, "What was the cause?" but, "What will be the result?" A vast amount of experimentation that is performed on each newly discovered chemical element,—as the present investigations into the properties of radium,—is of this relatively aimless character. In so far, however, as an experiment has a distinct practical purpose, Professor Dewey's formulation holds true,—as it holds true of all practical research by any method whatsoever. What we care to know is the means to our end. Thus the definitely practical experiment takes the form: "Will these means (suggested by analogy, observed coincidence, or other imperfect induction) lead to the desired end?" But the actual experiment is always directly a synthesis, and only indirectly ever an analysis.

What, then, of Prof. Dewey's illustration, the problem of the nature of water? "Water simply as a given fact resists indefinitely and obstinately any direct mode of approach. No amount of observation of it, as given, yields analytic comprehension. Observation but complicates the problem by revealing unsuspected qualities that require additional explanation" (p. 109). On a first reading, these sentences seem incomprehensible. For the writer has just said that "by nature, in science, we mean a knowledge for purposes of intellectual and practical control." Surely a great mass of knowledge of water, enabling us to turn it to a vast number of practical ends, has been obtained by direct observation and scrutiny. Why, then, with the definition just given of the nature of a substance, should such practical knowledge be accounted a mere complication of the problem of its nature? And what is "analytic comprehension"?

The next few sentences furnish a seeming explanation of Professor Dewey's meaning. "What experimentation does is to let us see into water in the process of making. Through generating water we single out the precise and sole conditions which have to be fulfilled that water may present itself as an experienced fact." Are we, then, to understand by the nature of water its chemical constitution? Is that rather to be accounted its nature than the observed facts, that it evaporates and freezes and quenches thirst? Or is "analytic comprehension" to mean knowledge of chemical analysis? Are the physical properties of water actually explained by its chemical analysis? Surely something has been said here that was not clearly intended. But, further, does the chemical composition of a substance constitute the condition of its genesis? Decidedly not. Despite all that the experiment of generating water proves, not a particle of water in the