Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/192

188 describing our knowledge of nature. But we should fall wofullywoefully [sic] short were we to be satisfied with such an account of it. We can reach the kernel of a more adequate account by way of that indispensable aid to scientific discovery known as hypothesis-making.

A few, only a few, men of science have proposed to eliminate hypotheses from science altogether. The best known of these eliminators is Wilhelm Ostwald. In the place of the hypothesis Ostwald would install what he calls the protothesis. And what is that? It is a "vorläufige Annahme." There you have it! A protothesis is a taking of something by running on ahead. Ostwald wants to get rid of hypotheses altogether and rely wholly on "Arbeit," on work, to make conquests in science. But see what his proposal comes to, taking his own words. He is going to do part of to-morrow's work to-day, even at this very instant. The mind forecasts. It outstrips its past and present experiences. That is the vital fact, and why quibble about how it shall be named?

All generalization is hypothesis, says M. Poincaré. Think about it and you will see the eminent Frenchman is right. Think about it further and you will see you can not move ahead in real science one inch without generalization. But for it you might possibly have coordinated experiences which by courtesy might he called knowledge. But such knowledge would be wholly without motive, and what rational being would care a snap for such knowledge!

We must not fail to notice how radically at variance this way of interpreting the mind's work is from Kant's way of interpreting it. Kantians speak of that which the "mind itself puts into nature." If something is really put into nature, that something must have been previously outside of nature. You can not put water into a dish that is already in the dish. What is that outside something? Where is the outside source whence it comes? Ask the unfortunate mortals of whom Laura Bridgman was an instance, who are deprived from tender infancy of their sense organs, whether they know of some source of knowledge wholly outside nature. These cases furnish indubitable evidence, so far as they go, that consciousness has no content till sense perception gives it some.

No, the mind does not put something into nature that was previously outside it. This however, it does do: It takes something from one part of nature and puts it into another part. We must allow that the mind really does put something into any particular situation that -was not in that situation before. But that is quite different from allowing that it puts something into nature as a whole that was not before somewhere in nature as a whole. This brings us back to our standardized, or tested, or relative reality.

If we ask how or by virtue of what quality or force the mind does this running ahead, this transferring of something from one part of