the contradictions in its nature which are
associated with its inclusion in individual experience, its references
beyond itself when so included, may themselves be the starting-point of
a reconstruction which at least carries that object beyond the
experience within which these contradictions arose; and third, it is
assumed that this growth takes place in a world of reality within which
the incomplete experience of the individual is an essential part of the
process, in which it is not a mere fiction, destroying reality by its
representation, but is a growing-point in that reality itself.

These characters of philosophic interpretation, the inclusion of the
object of knowledge in the individual experience and the turning of the
conflicts in that experience into the occasion for the creation of new
objects transcending these contradictions, are the characters in the
conscious method, of modern science, which most profoundly distinguish
it from the method of ancient science. This, of course, is tantamount to
saying that they are those which mark the experimental method in
science.

That phase of the method upon which I have touched already has been its
occupation with the so-called data or facts as distinguished from
Aristotelian individuals.

Whenever we reduce the objects of scientific investigation to facts and
undertake to record them as such, they become events, happenings, whose
hard factual character lies in the circumstance that they have taken
place, and this quite independently of any explanation of their taking
place. When they are explained they have ceased to be facts and have
become instances of a law, that is, Aristotelian individuals, embodied
theories, and their actuality as events is lost in the necessity of
their occurrence as expressions of the law; with this change their
particularity as events or happenings disappears. They are but the
specific values of the equation when constants are substituted for
variables. Before the equation is known or the law discovered they have
no such ground of existence. Up to this point they find their ground for
existence in their mere occurrence, to which the law which is to explain
them must accommodate itself.

There are here suggested two points of view from which these facts may
be regarded. Considered with reference to a uniformity or law by which
they will be ordered and explained they are the phenomena with which the
positivist deals; as existencies to be i