s it, and to abstract in the world as he conceives it those features
which carry with them the occurrence he is endeavoring to place.
Especially it enables him to make his thought a part of the socially
accepted and socially organized science to which his thought belongs. He
is far too modest to demand that the world be as his inference demands.

He asks that his view of the world be cogent and convincing to all those
whose thinking has made his own possible, and be an acceptable premise
for the conduct of that society to which he belongs. The hypothesis has
no universal and necessary characters except those that belong to the
thought which preserves the same meanings to the same objects, the same
relations between the same relata, the same attributes of assent and
dissent under the same conditions, the same results of the same
combinations of the same things. For scientific research the meanings,
the relations with the relata, the assent and dissent, the combinations
and the things combined are all in the world of experience. Thinking in
its abstractions and identifications and reconstructions undertakes to
preserve the values that it finds, and the necessity of its thinking
lies in its ability to so identify, preserve, and combine what it has
isolated that the thought structure will have an identical import under
like conditions for the thinker with all other thinkers to whom these
instruments of research conduct are addressed. Whatever conclusions the
scientist draws as necessary and universal results from his hypothesis
for a world independent of his thought are due, not to the cogency of
his logic, but to other considerations. For he knows if he reflects that
another problem may arise which will in its solution change the face of
the world built upon the present hypothesis. He will defend the
inexorableness of his reasoning, but the premises may change. Even the
contents of tridimensional space and sensuous time are not essential to
the cogency of that reasoning nor can the unbroken web of the argument
assure the content of the world as invariable. His universals, when
applied to nature, are all hypothetical universals; hence the import of
experiment as the test of an hypothesis. Experience does not rule out
the possible cropping up of a new problem which may shift the values
attained. Experience simply reveals that the new hypothesis fits into
the meanings of the world which are not shaken; it shows that, with the