Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/284

272 reasons for those acts. But if we regard all activity as being due to purposive individuals, we not only observe and describe the activity but we understand it. It acquires meaning, where before it was meaningless.

The new scientific method is, then, in its own field and for its own purposes, a most powerful weapon of research. For the ends it has in view, the ignoration of the subject of experience is justifiable; but this only so long as we remember that the results obtained must not be regarded as giving a fully adequate account of things, even on the objective side of experience alone, but simply an account, which, in its proper application, is the most satisfactory that can be obtained, owing to the limitations of the conceptual standpoint. The ignoration of the subject has, however, the important consequence that the results obtained by the scientific method may not validly be used to criticize such an hypothesis as pluralism, for they stand on an altogether different ground. On the one hand we are investigating the logical form of facts, on the other we are out to explain the facts, and unless in doing so we describe the facts wrongly, we cannot lay ourselves open to criticism of the kind indicated.

The type of result afforded by the scientific method leaves most of us unsatisfied. We wish to go further than mere description. The pluralistic hypothesis is an endeavor to satisfy this wish. It attempts to put everything in terms of things whose nature we actually realize, and which may therefore be simply indicated without the necessity of formal conceptual specification. This is all the more important because such a specification can never adequately comprehend the object to which it refers. Pluralism is, of course, an hypothesis, and therefore subject to the limitations of hypothesis in general, but it is based on no assumptions save in so far as it makes use of the logical canons of reasoning, if those can be called 'assumptions.' The assertion of the existence of the self is not an assumption; and although we have referred to the assertion of the existence of other people as being an assumption, it is not so, strictly speaking, but rather the first step in the application of the pluralistic hypothesis to the explanation of the facts of experience.