assumed that the theories are mental or subjective and change while the
facts remain unchanged. Even when it is assumed that theories and facts
agree, men speak of a correspondence or parallelism between idea and the
reality to which it refers. While this attitude seems to be that of
science toward the disproved theories which lie behind it, it is not its
attitude to the theories which it accepts. These are not regarded as
merely parallel to realities, as abstracted from the structure of
things. These meanings go into the makeup of the world. It is true that
the scientist who looks before and after realizes that any specific
meaning which is now accepted may be questioned and discarded. If he
carries his refection far enough he sees that a complete elimination of
all the meanings which might conceivably be so discredited would leave
nothing but logical constants, a world with no facts in any sense. In
this position he may of course take an agnostic attitude and be
satisfied with the attitude of Hume or Mill or Russell. But if he does
so, he will pass into the camp of the psychological philosophers and
will have left the position of the scientist. The scientist always deals
with an _actual_ problem, and even when he looks before and after he
does so in so far as he is facing in inquiry some actual problem. No
actual problem could conceivably take on the form of a conflict
involving the whole world of meaning. The conflict always arises between
an individual experience and certain laws, certain meanings while others
are unaffected. These others form the necessary field without which no
conflict can arise. They give the man of research his ([Greek: pou sto])
upon which he can formulate his problem and undertake its solution. The
possible calling in question of any content, whatever it may be, means
always that there is left a field of unquestioned reality. The attitude
of the scientist never contemplates or could contemplate the possibility
of a world in which there would be no reality by which to test his
hypothetical solution of the problem that arises. Nor does this attitude
when applied to past discarded theories necessarily carry with it the
implication that these older theories were subjective ideas in men's
minds, while the reality lay beside and beyond them unmingled with
ideas. It always finds a standpoint from which these ideas in the
earlier situation are still recognized as reliable, for there are no
scientific