Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/250

238 some fact. This being so, we naturally turn, in the first instance, to hypotheses which are truly explanatory. For our purposes an explanatory hypothesis may be formally defined as 'an account of a system which can be formulated symbolically in terms of active subjects of experience.' The conceptual formula as such, which sets forth the hypothesis, is of course, descriptive, but its concrete meaning is explanatory in a sense in which that of a formula in terms of objective things is not.

It should be noted with reference to the type of result likely to be obtained from the scientific as opposed to the genetic method, that logical constructions of sense-data can never give a self. Hence, as selves certainly exist, no hypothesis in such terms can explain the universe nor even completely describe it. Pluralism, on the other hand, is not only explanatory, but it also complies with the condition demanded by Occam's razor. Far from multiplying entities, it is expressed in terms of entities certain examples of which we know to exist, and which any hypothesis must therefore take into account.

IV. Points of Conflict between Pluralism and the 'New Realism.&#39;—The supporters of the new scientific method hold that pluralism cannot be true because the conceptions on which it is based conflict with their results, and are therefore invalid. An analysis of the problem seems to show that the supposed conflict springs in the first instance from two main points of difference. These are the existence of the self, and the true meaning and validity of the categories of experience, particularly those of continuity and causality.

The scientific method lays stress on the objective side of experience. It investigates the object of experience, not in relation to the subject, but considered per se, and therefore in abstraction from the subject. It considers what meaning certain concepts must have if they are to be valid when applied to the object of experience thus isolated from the subject. Hence it fails to take account of the fact that the growth of experience consists in action and reaction between subject and object, manifested in an ever-increasing complexity and differentiation of the object, and