he situation tended to raise the question as to the
existence of anything constant and universal in the realm of nature and
society. Reason was the faculty by which the universal principle and
essence is apprehended; while the senses were the organs of perceiving
change,--the unstable and the diverse as against the permanent and
uniform. The results of the work of the senses, preserved in memory
and imagination, and applied in the skill given by habit, constituted
experience.

Experience at its best is thus represented in the various
handicrafts--the arts of peace and war. The cobbler, the flute player,
the soldier, have undergone the discipline of experience to acquire the
skill they have. This means that the bodily organs, particularly the
senses, have had repeated contact with things and that the result of
these contacts has been preserved and consolidated till ability in
foresight and in practice had been secured. Such was the essential
meaning of the term "empirical." It suggested a knowledge and an ability
not based upon insight into principles, but expressing the result of a
large number of separate trials. It expressed the idea now conveyed by
"method of trial and error," with especial emphasis upon the more or
less accidental character of the trials. So far as ability of control,
of management, was concerned, it amounted to rule-of-thumb procedure,
to routine. If new circumstances resembled the past, it might work well
enough; in the degree in which they deviated, failure was likely. Even
to-day to speak of a physician as an empiricist is to imply that he
lacks scientific training, and that he is proceeding simply on the basis
of what he happens to have got out of the chance medley of his past
practice. Just because of the lack of science or reason in "experience"
it is hard to keep it at its poor best. The empiric easily degenerates
into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge begins or leaves
off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he begins to
pretend--to make claims for which there is no justification, and
to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others--to "bluff."
Moreover, he assumes that because he has learned one thing, he knows
others--as the history of Athens showed that the common craftsmen
thought they could manage household affairs, education, and politics,
because they had learned to do the specific things of their trades.
Experience is always hovering, then, on the edge