Practical Colligion
 

Is it real? Is it workable?

by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

We have gone out of our way to present colligion and colligionism or colligationism as completely workable and on the up and up. While that may seem like a good start, any idea is worthless if it remains useless. If colligion is going to be of any value, we have to show applications for it that cannot be filled by any other single method or philosophy. Heed this promise: that will be the easiest part of this whole work.

Let's begin by creating an example of how colligation works. What we are looking for is an assortment of facts about something and what we can make of them to help us try to understand them. We want testable results so we can make certain our understanding is correct or correctable and, most important, useful and real. We'll begin with something we already know about.

We have arrived in a strange place. We have taken on a mission requiring us to categorize various plant materials available here, for a governmental project, perhaps an effort to develop the agriculture or establish an industry here. If we find something new that could be valuable, that would be a boon. We have basic knowledge we picked up earlier, in the place where we had lived. We begin looking around for food, and find several strange objects. They look familiar but we have no idea if they are safe to eat.

One of them is a soft and soppy-wet object we found on the shore. It looks clean and has a familiar fishy odor, but does not look like food. Inland, in a clearing, we found several other kinds of objects, many suspended from branches or stems. We find them in all kinds of configurations, but also notice they share some things in common.

Some of them appear lumpy when we remove a sample from a long stem rooted into the ground. We observe that each lump is a separate segment and has what appears to be a seed inside. We find others on low bushed close to the soil, but these are different, redder, and with an aroma even sweeter-smelling than those on the tall stems. We decide they are berries.

We find other objects of a different kind growing among the branches hanging over our heads. Some are red, a few are yellow, some are striped, fewer are smallish and a very dark red, and one tree stands alone in a large meadow. We can almost smell it as we approach, a heady sweet aroma that tempts us to taste a sample. The object's soft flesh renders it hard to split with our bare hands, and so we cut it open with a knife.

Inside is one large seed, a rough-looking object covered with criss-crossed hatchmarks. That differentiates it from the other tree-borne objects, whose seeds were contained in clusters around their centers, or whose single seed was round and smooth inside a much smaller fleshy substance. Another difference, we notice now, is the nature of its skin, which is fuzzy and ruddy-complexioned, and looser around the flesh than that of any of the other objects. Is this one the same, or different?

We think about it, and decide we have three kinds of objects growing on trees, and that they are not berries. We observe their commonness and their differences, and decide to categorize them as apples, cherries, and peach. We wonder that they seem so much alike, and yet so different, and have given them different names when they varied for particular reasons: the peach, because of its skin and unique seed; they apples, even though there were so many kinds and shapes, all held their seeds alike, shared the trait of a smooth, taught skin around a white pulp, and grew suspended from a single stem on trees that looked very much alike; the cherries, whose skin shared the shininess of the apples, but grew around a reddish, softer pulp and a hard, round seed—all were different, even though they shared many traits that distinguished them from the berries.

What we are doing is gathering facts and colligating them so that we can generate hypotheses regarding the uses of these objects and so that others can recognize them. We later discover that the upright stems with berries share the trait of thorniness with one or two kinds of the apples, and add that to our growing list of facts, noting also that none of the cherries, nor the peach, displayed this trait.

Others on our team of investigators have found objects rooted in the ground, and discovered a variety of them, Still others have found seeds inside leafy covers attached directly to the stems that held them, also with an even wider variety, including a couple of kinds that, similar to the berries, held many individual seeds in rows on a strong central stock, but also hidden beneath long, large-bundled leaves that grew on the sides of an upright stem. None of those seemed to be berries, apples or cherries. All of those grew on a different part of each plant than did the ones buried in the ground.

After we assembled all the facts we all had gathered, we realized we needed to categorize them in a larger fashion, and so named them fruits, roots and grains, and described them according to their different natures. The roots all shared a pulpiness or enough bulk so that, if we could learn to prepare them, and after adequate testing, they might provide useful foods. The fruits were everything that contained their seeds in a pulpy substance that, itself, might be edible. The grains produce seeds that we could eat, we thought, having observed some birds who were doing just that. Maybe all kinds of seeds could be eaten. That would need to be tested.

The foregoing describes how mankind most likely learned to survive from the beginnings of time, most likely before we ever gained the use of language, most certainly before we learned to read and write. Colligated information got passed from one generation to the next by direct experience, and to passers-by in that same manner. Some died or grew ill from testing new objects as the horizons widened and our forebears began exploring the world. The more astute among them could observe a common ill effect, and make the required connections to realize causes and effects, and that only people who had eaten certain kinds of foods grew ill or died soon afterward, and a new category opened up, that of poisons. Colligation of facts gave mankind a growing list of such substances, and that list could be tested by anybody who'd dare to challenge it: "Go ahead. You puke. You die."

Our make-believe situation produced a simple demonstration of a practical application of colligation. Life is vastly more complex than that, however, and some aspects of it are not all that they seem if we are too close to them to be completely observant. Too, some questions still go unanswered, and some claims have been made that secular folks who rely on factual information have nothing to guide them in some areas of life.

Is that true? Can colligation provide legitimate answers to the hard questions? If you want to know that in a factual way, click the link and let the computer turn the page. If you are satisfied with the way things are or used to be, then use the other link so you can escape from this. I recommend, however, that you stay.

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"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —