overlooks the fact that he is also assuming some
content which is not analyzed and which is the ground of the
implication. In other words this logician confuses the scientific
attitude of being ready to question anything with an attitude of being
willing to question everything at once. It is only in an unquestioned
objective world that the exceptional instance appears and it is only in
such a world that an experimental science tests the implications of the
hypothetically reconstructed object.

The guess is happy because it carries with it the consequences which
follow from its fitting into the world, and the guess, in other words
the hypothesis, takes on this happy form solely because of the material
reconstruction which by its nature removes the unhappy contradiction and
promises the successful carrying out of the conflicting attitudes in the
new objective world. There is no such thing as formal implication.

Where no reconstruction of the world is involved in our identification
of objects that belong to it and where, therefore, no readjustment of
conduct is demanded, such a logic symbolizes what takes place in our
direct recognition of objects and our response to them. Then "X is a man
implies X is mortal for all values of X" exactly symbolizes the attitude
toward a man subject to a disease supposedly mortal. But it fails to
symbolize the biological research which starting with inexplicable
sporadic cases of an infectious disease carries over from the study of
the life history of infusoria a hypothetical reconstruction of the
history of disease and then acts upon the result of this assumption.
Research-science presents a world whose form is always universal, but
this universal form is neither a metaphysical assumption nor a fixed
form of the understanding. While the scientist may as a metaphysician
assume the existence of realities which lie beyond a possible
experience, or be a Kantian or Neo-Kantian, neither of these attitudes
is necessary for his research. He may be a positivist--a disciple of
Hume or of John Stuart Mill. He may be a pluralist who conceives, with
William James, that the order which we detect in parts of the universe
is possibly one that is rising out of the chaos and which may never be
as universal as our hypothesis demands. None of these attitudes has any
bearing upon his scientific method. This simplifies his thinking,
enables him to identify the object in which he is interested wherever he
find