1. we have in
Scn a certain
doctrine about
confusion. It is called the
doctrine of the stable
datum. If you
saw a great many pieces of paper whirling about a room they would
look confused until you picked out one piece of paper to be the piece of paper by which everything else was in
motion. In other words, a confusing
motion can be understood by conceiving one thing to be motionless. Until one selects one
datum, one
factor, one
particular in a
confusion of particles, the
confusion continues. The one thing selected and used becomes the stable
datum for the remainder.
(POW, p. 23) 2. any
body of
knowledge more particularly and exactly, is built from one
datum. That is its stable
datum.
Invalidate it and the entire
body of
knowledge falls apart. A stable
datum does not have to be the correct one. It is simply the one that keeps things from being in a
confusion and on which others are
aligned.
(POW, p. 24)
Stable Datum (Def. 2) 3. a
datum which keeps things from being in a
confusion and around which other
data align.
(NSOL, p. 66)