Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a
multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the
principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical
meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based
upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used
more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity
happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to
deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically"
controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it
depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models
set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of
using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind.
It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it,
to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is
experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to
change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of
experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the
operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond
experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that
has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found
indigenous in experience: -- the factor by which past experiences
are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance.
The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech,
being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to
understand, but also that which is far away from life.
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