Science and Philosophy

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY T HE system of education which generally prevails in English-speaking countries bears many traces of the positivistic past in which it was developed, and has produced an atmosphere or mental outlook which, though favorable to the progress of the physical sciences, is definitely alien, if not hostile, to any proper appreciation of philosophic thought. Most people learn the rudiments of physical science and mathematics at school, but remain in absolute ignorance of even the very nature of philosophy; whereas, in many continental countries, philosophy figures conspicuously in the scholastic curriculum, with the result that the students can face life with a broad and universal outlook denied to those who have become acquainted with only one attitude and approach to the problems of life, and who turn to science to afford them the explanation of the univers.e. A public opinion which is unfavorable to, because ignorant of, philosophy has thus been created, and the philosopher has practically no common ground on which he can meet his public. For most people, philosophy is regarded as a sort of abstract theorizing about the facts of science, to whose methods and criteria it is bound. In practice this attitude, which is not only that of the man in the street but of many scientists also, amounts to a denial of philosophy as a distinct and independent branch of knowledge; and the philosopher comes to be regarded as a man who, through indolence or incapacity, shirks the detailed research of science, and contents himself with speculations or hypotheses built upon the facts which scientists have discovered at the cost of so much labor. In an attempt to explain the position of the philosopher in relation to the scientist, the following pages have been written. The distinction between the scientific attitude and the philo68 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 69 sophical attitude 1 can only be rightly understood in the light of the historical causes which are responsible for their confusion . This historical retrospect will introduce us to the properly philosophical doctrine as to the relation of the sciences to philosophy ; and in conclusion we will exemplify our conclusions by applying them to certain subjects on which science and philosophy seem to be in conflict. We can trace back the movement which substituted science for philosophy to the Renaissance,2 but it is above all in the doctrines of Descartes that we can see the germs of the whole later development both of science and of modern philosophy. To Descartes is due the antithesis " nature-spirit " which was to dominate later philosophy, thus giving it an anthropocentric trend, and setting it on the high road to idealism. His concept of man as a mysterious union of two complete substances, one spiritual, the other extended, each endowed with its own independent life and in opposition to the other element, led to the regarding as the real man the thinking " I," the soul, whose essence is pure thought, and which has no direct contact and interaction with the body in the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge, therefore, cannot begin in the senses, and sensation itself is a form of thought, so that other animals than man are pure machines; our real ideas are infused by a kind God, whose veracity is sufficient criterion of truth for us. Hence the proper method of knowledge is not discursive reasoning, but intuition; we have certain primitive ideas, clear and evident to the original vision of the mind, and deduction is but the process of combining these intuitions. But knowledge represents reality; 1 Modern usage of the word " scientific " cloaks an equivocation which may lead people to regard philosophy as " unscientific." The word " science " is now generally only applied to the body of the positive sciences; and in distinguishing the scientific and philosophical, we mean that philosophy is distinct from these sciences , with methods and aims specifically its own. But philosophy is a science in the technical sense of the word, and more perfectly than the particular sciences, as we hope to make clear in the course of this article. 2 The medieval Platonists, especially Robert Grosseteste, had already arrived at some kind of pan-mathematicism; cf. C. Dawson, Mediaeval...