olates this particular
exception which constitutes the scientific problems as an individual
experience. The extent to which the analysis is carried depends upon the
exigencies of the problem. It is the indefinite variety of the problems
which accounts for the indefinite variety of the facts. What constitutes
them facts in the sense in which we are using the term is their
_exceptional_ nature; formally they appear as particular judgments,
being denials of universal judgments, whether positive or negative. This
exceptional nature robs the events of a reality which would have
belonged to them as instances of a universal law. It leaves them,
however, with the rest of their meaning. But the value which they have
lost is just that which was essential to give them their place in the
world as it has existed for thought. Banished from that universally
valid structure, their ground for existence is found in the experience
of the puzzled observer. Such an observation was that of the moons of
Jupiter made possible by the primitive telescope of Galileo. For those
who lived in a Ptolemaic cosmos, these could have existence only as
observations of individuals. As moons they had distinct meaning,
circling Jupiter as our moon circles the earth, but being in
contradiction with the Ptolemaic order they could depend for their
existence only on the evidence of the senses, until a Copernican order
could give them a local habitation and a name. Then they were observed
not as the experiences of individuals but as instances of planetary
order in a heliocentric system. It would be palpably absurd to refer to
them as mere sense-data, mere sensations. They are for the time being
inexplicable experiences of certain individuals. They are inexplicable
because they have a meaning which is at variance with the structure of
the whole world to which they belong. They are the phenomena termed
accidental by Aristotle and rejected as full realities by him, but which
have become, in the habitat of individual experience, the headstone of
the structure of modern research of science.

A rationalism which relegates implication to the indefinables cannot
present the process of modern science. Implication is exactly that
process by which these events pass from their individual existence into
that of universal reality, and the scientist is at pains to define it as
the experimental method. It is true that a proposition implies
implication. But the proposition is the