s much to suggest the causal relations sought.
The headings under which data will be collected depend on
the purposes of the investigation. In general, statistics can
suggest generalizations, rather than establish them. They
indicate probability, not invariable relation.[2]

[Footnote 2: See Jones: _Logic_, pp. 213-25, for a discussion
of Probability.]

SCIENCE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF HUMAN PROGRESS. We have, in
an earlier section of this chapter, referred to the practical
value of science. "Man's power of deliberate control of his
own affairs depends upon ability to direct energies to use; an
ability which is, in turn, dependent upon insight into nature's
processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist,...
it is knowledge of the conditions of human action."[3]
And the wider, the more complete and the more penetrating
our knowledge of the world in which we live, the more extended
become the boundaries of human action. Through
a knowledge of natural processes, men have passed from a
frightened subjection to Nature to its conscious control. And
the fruits of that control are, as we have already had occasion
to notice, all-pervading in practical life. That complete
transformation of life known as the Industrial Revolution,
which came about with such swiftness and completeness in
the early nineteenth century, and whose effects have not yet
ceased to accumulate, was the direct outcome of the application
of the experimental science which had begun in the
sixteenth. Some of the consequences of the application of
theoretical investigation to practical life have already been
noted. There are first the more obvious facts of the inventions,
great and small--the railways, steamships, electric
transportation, automobiles, and telephones--which have
changed in countless details our daily life. There are the
profound and all-pervasive changes which have been brought
about in industrial and social relations: the building-up of
our vast industrial centers, the change from small-scale
handicrafts to large-scale machine production, the factory
system, with its concomitants of immensely increased resources
and immensely complicated problems of human
life. Science in the short span of three centuries has shown
how rapid and immediate could be the fruits of human control
of Nature, and its further fruits are incalculable.

[Footnote 3: Dewey: _Democracy and Education_, p. 267.]

Science has indeed already begun to affect m