This attempt to justify the historical method by showing that it is implied in physical experiment is of dubious value. Its net result would seem to be the conclusion that every fact may be dealt with either as a historical fact or as a datum for physical science. Even here, however, Dewey slurs over certain difficulties which demand close scrutiny. The treatment of individuality is most unsatisfactory. While each portion or instance of water is itself, and has its own unquestionable uniqueness, no case is a mere particular, but each is a true individual, which means that it is, as it occurs, an instance of a general phenomenon. While the scientist must deal with specific cases of water, he has no regard for their particularity, but chooses them as instances, and is from first to last occupied with their typical characteristics. The historian, also, selects relevant and representative instances, in so far as his history is interpretative and not mere narrative. A merely factual account of a series of events is not science, and never could be. Dewey now turns to the ethical field, with the purpose of showing that the historical method in ethics does for this science precisely what the experimental method does for other sciences. "History offers to us the only available substitute for the isolation and for the cumulative recombination of experiment. The early periods present us in their relative crudeness and simplicity with a substitute for the artificial operation of an experiment: following the phenomenon into the more complicated and refined form which it assumes later, is a substitute for the synthesis of the experiment."[154] Hydrogen and oxygen are the historical antecedents of water, whose synthesis the scientist observes, and so the more primitive forms of conduct are the elements which the moralist traces in their process of becoming fused into the present social fabric. Primitive social practices cannot be artificially isolated, like the physical elements, but they can be traced to their historical origins, and their interweaving towards present complex conditions can be observed.