Abstract

“All experience is an arch wherethro’ gleams” an untravell'd world and through which come the joyous adventures of life and also grief and pain. Since all that we know and hope to know and think we know must come through this arch and since the primary task of science is the validation and enlargement of knowledge, science is vitally interested in this experience and its interpretation. This interest stems not from the philosopher's epistemology but it is strictly operational. We want to know what kind of experience yields reliable knowledge when checked against other experience and applied in practical adjustment to things as they are and to prediction of the probable future course of events. In short, the field of natural science embraces everything that comes within the range of human experience. Its specific functions are to codify this mixed experience, to search out those uniformities which yield classification, verification and prediction, and from these observed uniformities to construct by sound reasoning verifiable laws, hypotheses and theories, that is, to find the meaning of the experiences had. First we want to know the facts, but what we are after in the upshot is the interpretation of the facts.