Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/45

Rh they serve to bring out the fact that one and the same item of human experience may enter, as part of their subject-matter, into a large number of sciences; whence it follows that the sciences themselves can not be distinguished, in any final accounting, by the specific character of the "objects" with which they deal.

What in fact differentiates science from science is, as an earlier sentence has hinted, something that we may term objectively point of view and subjectively attitude. Giving up the figure of the map, one might conceive of the world of experience as contained in a great circle, and of scientific men as viewing this world from various stations upon the periphery. There are then, in theory, as many possible sciences as there are distinguishable points of view about the circle. Every science seeks to view the whole world of experience from its particular station; and every science deals, from that station again, with identically the same subject-matter, namely, with human experience. The separate sciences are, therefore, not at all like the countries on a map; they are rather like the successive chapters of a book which discusses a complex topic from various points of view. In this sense, they overlap; they are mutually complementary; no one of them in truth exhausts experience or completely describes the common subject-matter, though each one, if ideally complete, would exhaust some aspect of experience.

It is, then, from some such figure as that of the circle and the men around it that a classification of the sciences must start. We must add, however, both for the sake of clear thinking and to forestall criticism, that the figure does not "work"—it loses its regular outline and at the same time grows more complex—when we come down to details. Thus, to say that the world of experience is a circle is to say that all the sciences, at least in their ideal completion, are coextensive; and to say that the sciences are views of the world obtained from standpoints about the circle is to say that all the separate sciences are, as sciences, coequal; and both of these statements may fairly be challenged. Such matters of detail, difficulties as they are to those who attempt a classification of the sciences, need not however detain us; the fundamental idea of our figure is sound. The figure itself helps us even a little further; for the question how it comes about that men can take up their stations around the circle, and so view human experience as if from without, is evidently the problem of a theory of knowledge, of logic in the broader sense; and the question of the essential nature of the whole, of experience viewed and experiencers viewing, is as evidently the problem of a metaphysics.