These preconceptions are the assumption that knowledge has auniquely privileged position as amode of access to reality in comparison with other modes of experience, and that as such it is superior to practical activity. Both of these ideas were formulated in a period when knowing was regarded as something which could be effected exclusively by means of the rational powers of mind. The development of scientific inquiry with its complete dependence upon experimentation has proved the profound error of the latter position. Is it not time to revise the philo- sophical conceptions which are founded on abelief now proved to be false? The sum and substance of the present argument is that if we frame our conception of knowledge on the experimental model, we find that it is away of operating upon and with the things of ordinary experience so that we can frame our ideas of them in terms of their interactions with one another, instead of in terms of the qualities they directly present, and that thereby our control of them, our