The Approach to Philosophy Part 6

[94:12] In this discussion of Judaism I am much indebted to Matthew Arnold's _Literature and Dogma_, especially Chapters I and II.

[104:13] James Thomson: _The City of Dreadful Night_. Quoted by James, in _The Will to Believe, etc._, p. 45.

[106:14] _Revelation_, 19:11-13.

CHAPTER V

NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

[Sidenote: The True Relations of Philosophy and Science. Misconceptions and Antagonisms.]

- 39. In the case of natural science we meet not only with a special human interest, but with a theoretical discipline. We are confronted, therefore, with a new question: that of the relation within the body of human knowledge of two of its const.i.tuent members. Owing to the militant temper of the representatives of both science and philosophy, this has long since ceased to be an academic question, and has frequently been met in the spirit of rivalry and partisans.h.i.+p. But the true order of knowledge is only temporarily distorted by the brilliant success of a special type of investigation; and the conquests of science are now so old a story that critical thought shows a disposition to judge of the issue with sobriety and logical highmindedness.

In the seventeenth century a newly emanc.i.p.ated and too sanguine reason proposed to know the whole of nature at once in terms of mathematics and mechanics. Thus the system of the Englishman Hobbes was science swelled to world-proportions, simple, compact, conclusive, and all-comprehensive. Philosophy proposed to do the work of science, but in its own grand manner. The last twenty years of Hobbes's life, spent in repeated discomfiture at the hands of Seth Ward, Wallis, Boyle, and other scientific experts of the new Royal Society, certified conclusively to the failure of this enterprise, and the experimental specialist thereupon took exclusive possession of the field of natural law. But the idealist, on the other hand, reconstructed nature to meet the demands of philosophical knowledge and religious faith. There issued, together with little mutual understanding and less sympathy, on the one hand _positivism_, or exclusive experimentalism, and on the other hand a rabid and unsympathetic transcendentalism. Hume, who consigned to the flames all thought save "abstract reasoning concerning quant.i.ty or number," and "experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence"; Comte, who a.s.signed metaphysics to an immature stage in the development of human intelligence; and Tyndall, who reduced the religious consciousness to an emotional experience of mystery, are typical of the one att.i.tude. The other is well exhibited in Sch.e.l.ling's reference to "the blind and thoughtless mode of investigating nature which has become generally established since the corruption of philosophy by Bacon, and of physics by Boyle." Dogmatic experimentalism and dogmatic idealism signify more or less consistently the abstract isolation of the scientific and philosophical motives.

There is already a touch of quaintness in both of these att.i.tudes. We of the present are in the habit of acknowledging the autonomy of science, and the unimpeachable validity of the results of experimental research in so far as they are sanctioned by the consensus of experts. But at the same time we recognize the definiteness of the task of science, and the validity of such reservations as may be made from a higher critical point of view. Science is to be transcended in so far as it is understood as a whole. Philosophy is critically empirical; empirical, because it regards all _bona fide_ descriptions of experience as knowledge; critical, because attentive to the conditions of both general and special knowledge. And in terms of a critical empiricism so defined, it is one of the problems of philosophy _to define and appraise the generating problem of science_, and so to determine the value a.s.signable to natural laws in the whole system of knowledge.

[Sidenote: The Spheres of Philosophy and Science.]

- 40. If this be the true function of philosophy with reference to science, several current notions of the relations of the spheres of these disciplines may be disproved. In the first place, philosophy will not be all the sciences regarded as one science. Science tends to unify without any higher criticism. The various sciences already regard the one nature as their common object, and the one system of interdependent laws as their common achievement. The philosopher who tries to be all science at once fails ignominiously because he tries to replace the work of a specialist with the work of a dilettante; and if philosophy be identical with that body of truth acc.u.mulated and organized by the cooperative activity of scientific men, then philosophy is a name and there is no occasion for the existence of the philosopher as such.

Secondly, philosophy will not be the a.s.sembling of the sciences; for such would be a merely clerical work, and the philosopher would much better be regarded as non-existent than as a book-keeper. Nor, thirdly, is philosophy an auxiliary discipline that may be called upon in emergencies for the solution of some baffling problem of science. A problem defined by science must be solved in the scientific manner.

Science will accept no aid from the G.o.ds when engaged in her own campaign, but will fight it out according to her own principles of warfare. And as long as science moves in her own plane, she can acknowledge no permanent barriers. There is then no need of any superscientific research that shall replace, or piece together, or extend the work of science. But the savant is not on this account in possession of the entire field of knowledge. It is true that he is not infrequently moved to such a conviction when he takes us about to view his estates. Together we ascend up into heaven, or make our beds in sheol, or take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea--and look in vain for anything that is not work done, or work projected, by natural science. Persuade him, however, to _define_ his estates, and he has circ.u.mscribed them. In his definition he must employ conceptions more fundamental than the working conceptions that he employs within his field of study. Indeed, in viewing his task as definite and specific he has undertaken the solution of the problem of philosophy. The logical self-consciousness has been awakened, and there is no honorable way of putting it to sleep again. This is precisely what takes place in any account of the generating problem of science. To define science is to define at least one realm that is other than science, the realm of active intellectual endeavor with its own proper categories. One cannot reflect upon science and a.s.sign it an end, and a method proper to that end, without bringing into the field of knowledge a broader field of experience than the field proper to science, broader at any rate by the presence in it of the scientific activity itself.

Here, then, is the field proper to philosophy. The scientist _qua_ scientist is intent upon his own determinate enterprise. The philosopher comes into being as one who is interested in observing what it is that the scientist is so intently doing. In taking this interest he has accepted as a field for investigation that which he would designate as the totality of interests or the inclusive experience. He can carry out his intention of defining the scientific att.i.tude only by standing outside it, and determining it by means of nothing less than an exhaustive searching out of all att.i.tudes. Philosophy is, to be sure, itself a definite activity and an att.i.tude, but an att.i.tude required by definition to be conscious of itself, and, if you please, conscious of its own consciousness, until its att.i.tude shall have embraced in its object the very principle of att.i.tudes. Philosophy defines itself and all other human tasks and interests. None have furnished a clearer justification of philosophy than those men of scientific predilections who have claimed the t.i.tle of agnostics. A good instance is furnished by a contemporary physicist, who has chosen to call his reflections "antimetaphysical."

"Physical science does not pretend to be a _complete_ view of the world; it simply claims that it is working toward such a complete view in the future. The highest philosophy of the scientific investigator is precisely this _toleration_ of an incomplete conception of the world and the preference for it, rather than an apparently perfect, but inadequate conception."[120:1]

It is apparent that if one were to challenge such a statement, the issue raised would at once be philosophical and not scientific. The problem here stated and answered, requires for its solution the widest inclusiveness of view, and a peculiar interest in critical reflection and logical coordination.

[Sidenote: The Procedure of a Philosophy of Science.]

- 41. One may be prepared for a knowledge of the economic and social significance of the railway even if one does not know a throttle from a piston-rod, provided one has broad and well-balanced knowledge of the interplay of human social interests. One's proficiency here requires one to stand off from society, and to obtain a perspective that shall be as little distorted as possible. The reflection of the philosopher of science requires a similar quality of perspective. All knowledges, together with the knowing of them, must be his object yonder, standing apart in its wholeness and symmetry. Philosophy is the least dogmatic, the most empirical, of all disciplines, since it is the only investigation that can permit itself to be forgetful of nothing.

But the most comprehensive view may be the most distorted and false. The true order of knowledge is the difficult task of logical a.n.a.lysis, requiring as its chief essential some determination of the scope of the working conceptions of the different independent branches of knowledge.

In the case of natural science this would mean an examination of the method and results characteristic of this field, for the sake of defining the kind of truth which attaches to the laws which are being gradually formulated. But one must immediately reach either the one or the other of two very general conclusions. If the laws of natural science cover all possible knowledge of reality, then there is left to philosophy only the logical function of justifying this statement. Logic and natural science will then const.i.tute the sum of knowledge. If, on the other hand, it be found that the aim of natural science is such as to exclude certain aspects of reality, then philosophy will not be restricted to logical criticism, but will have a cognitive field of its own. The great majority of philosophers have a.s.sumed the latter of these alternatives to be true, while most aggressive scientists have intended the former in their somewhat blind attacks upon "metaphysics." Although the selection of either of these alternatives involves us in the defence of a specific answer to a philosophical question, the issue is inevitable in any introduction to philosophy because of its bearing upon the extent of the field of that study. Furthermore there can be no better exposition of the meaning of philosophy of science than an ill.u.s.tration of its exercise. The following, then, is to be regarded as on the one hand a tentative refutation of _positivism_, or the _claim of natural science to be coextensive with knowable reality_; and on the other hand a programme for the procedure of philosophy with reference to natural science.

[Sidenote: The Origin of the Scientific Interest.]

- 42. Science issues through imperceptible stages from organic habits and instincts which signify the possession by living creatures of a power to meet the environment on its own terms. Every organism possesses such a working knowledge of nature, and among men the first science consists in those habitual adjustments common to men and infra-human organisms. Man is already practising science before he recognizes it. As _skill_ it distinguishes itself early in his history from lore, or untested tradition. Skill is familiarity with general kinds of events, together with ability to identify an individual with reference to a kind, and so be prepared for the outcome. Thus man is inwardly prepared for the alternation of day and night, and the periods of the seasons. He practically antic.i.p.ates the procession of natural events in the countless emergencies of his daily life. But science in the stricter sense begins when skill becomes _free_ and _social_.

[Sidenote: Skill as Free.]

- 43. Skill may be said to be _free_ when the essential terms of the action have been abstracted from the circ.u.mstances attending them in individual experiences, and are retained as ideal plans applicable to any practical occasion. The monkey who swings with a trapeze from his perch on the side of the cage, counts upon swinging back again without any further effort on his own part. His act and its successful issue signify his practical familiarity with the natural motions of bodies. We can conceive such a performance to be accompanied by an almost entire failure to grasp its essentials. It would then be necessary for nearly the whole situation to be repeated in order to induce in the monkey the same action and expectation. He would require a similar form, color, and distance. But he might, on the other hand, regard as practically identical all suspended and freely swinging bodies capable of affording him support, and quite independently of their shape, size, time, or place. In this latter case his skill would be applicable to the widest possible number of cases that could present themselves. Having a discerning eye for essentials, he would lose no chance of a swing through looking for more than the bare necessities. When the physicist describes the pendulum in terms of a formula such as t = 2pi[squareroot(l/g)] he exhibits a similar discernment. He has found that the time occupied by an oscillation of any pendulum may be calculated exclusively in terms of its length and the acceleration due to gravity. The monkey's higher proficiency and the formula alike represent a knowledge that is free in the sense that it is contained in terms that require no single fixed context in immediacy. The knowledge is valid wherever these essential terms are present; and calculations may be based upon these essential terms, while attendant circ.u.mstances vary _ad infinitum_. Such knowledge is said to be _general_ or _universal_.

There is another element of freedom, however, which so far has not been attributed to the monkey's knowledge, but which is evidently present in that of the physicist. The former has a practical ability to deal with a pendulum when he sees it. The latter, on the other hand, knows about a pendulum whether one be present or not. His knowledge is so retained as always to be available, even though it be not always applicable. His knowledge is not merely skill in treating a situation, but the possession of resources which he may employ at whatever time, and in whatever manner, may suit his interests. Knowing what he does about the pendulum, he may act from the idea of such a contrivance, and with the aid of it construct some more complex mechanism. His formulas are his instruments, which he may use on any occasion. Suppose that a situation with factors _a_, _b_, and _c_ requires factor _d_ in order to become _M_, as desired. Such a situation might easily be hopeless for an organism reacting directly to the stimulus _abc_, and yet be easily met by a free knowledge of _d_. One who knows that _l_, _m_, and _n_ will produce _d_, may by these means provide the missing factor, complete the sum of required conditions, _abcd_, and so obtain the end _M_. Such indirection might be used to obtain any required factor of the end, or of any near or remote means to the end. There is, in fact, no limit to the complexity of action made possible upon this basis; for since it is available in idea, the whole range of such knowledge may be brought to bear upon any individual problem.

[Sidenote: Skill as Social.]

- 44. But knowledge of this free type becomes at the same time _social_ or _inst.i.tutional_. It consists no longer in a skilful adaptation of the individual organism, but in a system of terms common to all intelligence, and preserved in those books and other monuments which serve as the articulate memory of the race. A knowledge that is social must be composed of unequivocal conceptions and fixed symbols. The mathematical laws of the exact sciences represent the most successful attainment of this end so far as form is concerned. Furthermore, the amount of knowledge may now be increased from generation to generation through the service of those who make a vocation of its pursuit. Natural science is thus a c.u.mulative racial proficiency, which any individual may bring to bear upon any emergency of his life.

[Sidenote: Science for Accommodation and Construction.]

- 45. Such proficiency as science affords is in every case the antic.i.p.ation of experience. This has a twofold value for mankind, that of _accommodation_, and that of _construction_. Primitively, where mere survival is the function of the organism as a whole, the value of accommodation is relatively fundamental. The knowledge of what may be expected enables the organism to save itself by means of its own counter-arrangement of natural processes. Construction is here for the sake of accommodation. But with the growth of civilization construction becomes a positive interest, and man tends to save himself for definite ends. Accommodation comes to take place for the sake of construction.

Science then supplies the individual with the ways and means wherewith to execute life purposes which themselves tend to a.s.sume an absolute value that cannot be justified merely on the ground of science.

[Sidenote: Method and Fundamental Conceptions of Natural Science. The Descriptive Method.]

- 46. If natural science be animated by any special cognitive interest, this motive should appear in the development of its method and fundamental conceptions. If that interest has been truly defined, it should now enable us to understand the progressive and permanent in scientific investigation as directly related to it. For the aim of any discipline exercises a gradual selection from among possible methods, and gives to its laws their determinate and final form.

The _descriptive method_ is at the present day fully established. A leading moral of the history of science is the superior usefulness of an exact account of the workings of nature to an explanation in terms of some qualitative potency. Explanation has been postponed by enlightened science until after a more careful observation of actual processes shall have been made; and at length it has been admitted that there is no need of any explanation but perfect description. Now the practical use of science defined above, requires no knowledge beyond the actual order of events. For such a purpose sufficient reason signifies only sufficient conditions. All other considerations are irrelevant, and it is proper to ignore them. Such has actually been the fate of the so-called metaphysical solution of special problems of nature. The case of Kepler is the cla.s.sic instance. This great scientist supplemented his laws of planetary motion with the following speculation concerning the agencies at work:

"We must suppose one of two things: either that the moving spirits, in proportion as they are more removed from the sun, are more feeble; or that there is one moving spirit in the centre of all the orbits, namely, in the sun, which urges each body the more vehemently in proportion as it is nearer; but in more distant s.p.a.ces languishes in consequence of the remoteness and attenuation of its virtue."[129:2]

The following pa.s.sage from Hegel affords an interesting a.n.a.logy:

"The moon is the waterless crystal which seeks to complete itself by means of our sea, to quench the thirst of its arid rigidity, and therefore produces ebb and flow."[129:3]

No scientist has ever sought to refute either of these theories. They have merely been neglected.

They were advanced in obedience to a demand for the ultimate explanation of the phenomena in question, and were obtained by applying such general conceptions as were most satisfying to the reasons of their respective authors. But they contributed nothing whatsoever to a practical familiarity with the natural course of events, in this case the times and places of the planets and the tides. Hence they have not been used in the building of science. In our own day investigators have become conscious of their motive, and do not wait for historical selection to exclude powers and reasons from their province. They deliberately seek to formulate exact descriptions. To this end they employ symbols that shall serve to identify the terms of nature, and formulas that shall define their systematic relations.h.i.+p. These systems must be exact, or deductions cannot be made from them. Hence they tend ultimately to a.s.sume a mathematical form of expression.

[Sidenote: s.p.a.ce, Time, and Prediction.]

- 47. But science tends to employ for these systems only such conceptions as relate to _prediction_; and of these the most fundamental are _s.p.a.ce_ and _time_. The first science to establish its method was the science of astronomy, where measurement and computation in terms of s.p.a.ce and time were the most obvious means of description; and the general application of the method of astronomy by Galileo and Newton, or the development of mechanics, is the most important factor in the establishment of modern science upon a permanent working basis. The persistence of the term _cause_, testifies to the fact that science is primarily concerned with the determination of _events_. Its definitions of objects are means of identification, while its laws are dynamical, _i. e._, have reference to the conditions under which these objects arise. Thus the chemist may know less about the properties of water than the poet; but he is preeminently skilled in its production from elements, and understands similarly the compounds into which it may enter. Now the general conditions of all antic.i.p.ation, whereby it becomes exact and verifiable, are s.p.a.cial and temporal. A predictable event must be a.s.signed to what is here now, or there now; or what is here then, or there then. An experimentally verifiable system must contain s.p.a.ce-time variables, for which can be subst.i.tuted the here and now of the experimenter's immediate experience. Hence science deals primarily with calculable places and moments. The mechanical theory of nature owes its success to a union of s.p.a.ce and time through its conceptions of _matter_ and _motion_.[132:4] And the projected theory of energetics must satisfy the same conditions.

[Sidenote: The Quant.i.tative Method.]

- 48. But, furthermore, science has, as we have seen, an interest in freeing its descriptions from the peculiar angle and relativity of an individual's experience, for the sake of affording him knowledge of that with which he must meet. Science enlightens the will by acquainting it with that which takes place in spite of it, and for which it must hold itself in readiness. To this end the individual benefits himself in so far as he eliminates himself from the objects which he investigates. His knowledge is useful in so far as it is valid for his own indefinitely varying stand-points, and those of other wills recognized by him in his practical relations. But in attempting to describe objects in terms other than those of a specific experience, science is compelled to describe them in terms of one another. For this purpose _the quant.i.tative method_ is peculiarly serviceable. With its aid objects permit themselves to be described as multiples of one another, and as occupying positions in relation to one another. When all objects are described strictly in terms of one another, they are expressed in terms of arbitrary units, and located in terms of arbitrary s.p.a.cial or temporal axes of reference. Thus there arises the universe of the scientific imagination, a vast complexity of material displacements and transformations, without color, music, pleasure, or any of all that rich variety of qualities that the least of human experiences contains. It does not completely rationalize or even completely describe such experiences, but formulates their succession. To this end they are reduced to terms that correspond to no specific experience, and for this very reason may be translated again into all definable hypothetical experiences. The solar system for astronomy is not a bird's-eye view of elliptical orbits, with the planets and satellites in definite phases.

Nor is it this group of objects from any such point of view, or from any number of such points of view; but a formulation of their motions that will serve as the key to an infinite number of their appearances. Or, consider the picture of the ichthysauria romping in the mesozoic sea, that commonly accompanies a text-book of geology. Any such picture, and all such pictures, with their coloring and their temporal and s.p.a.cial perspective, are imaginary. No such special and exclusive manifolds can be defined as having been then and there realized. But we have a geological knowledge of this period, that fulfils the formal demands of natural science, in so far as we can construct this and countless other specific experiences with reference to it.

[Sidenote: The General Development of Science.]

- 49. Science, then, is to be understood as springing from the practical necessity of antic.i.p.ating the environment. This antic.i.p.ation appears first as congenital or acquired reactions on the part of the organism.

Such reactions imply a fixed coordination or system in the environment whereby a given circ.u.mstance determines other circ.u.mstances; and science proper arises as the formulation of such systems. The requirement that they shall apply to the phenomena that _confront_ the will, determines their s.p.a.cial, temporal, and quant.i.tative form. The progress of science is marked by the growth of these conceptions in the direction of comprehensiveness on the one hand, and of refinement and delicacy on the other. Man lives in an environment that is growing at the same time richer and more extended, but with a compensatory simplification in the ever closer systematization of scientific conceptions under the form of the order of nature.

[Sidenote: The Determination of the Limits of Natural Science.]

- 50. At the opening of this chapter it was maintained that it is a function of philosophy to criticise science through its generating problem, or its self-imposed task viewed as determining its province and selecting its categories. The above account of the origin and method of science must suffice as a definition of its generating problem, and afford the basis of our answer to the question of its limits. Enough has been said to make it clear that philosophy is not in the field of science, and is therefore not ent.i.tled to contest its result in detail or even to take sides within the province of its special problems.

Furthermore, philosophy should not aim to restrain science by the imposition of external barriers. Whatever may be said of the sufficiency of its categories in any region of the world, that body of truth of which mathematics, mechanics, and physics are the foundations, must be regarded as a whole that tends to be all-comprehensive in its own terms.

There remains for philosophy, then, the critical examination of these terms, and the appraisal as a whole of the truth that they may express.

[Sidenote: Natural Science is Abstract.]

- 51. The impossibility of embracing the whole of knowledge within natural science is due to the fact that the latter is _abstract_. This follows from the fact that natural science is governed by a selective interest. The formulation of definitions and laws in exclusively mechanical terms is not due to the exhaustive or even preeminent reality of these properties, but to their peculiar serviceableness in a verifiable description of events. Natural science does not affirm that reality is essentially const.i.tuted of matter, or essentially characterized by motion; but is _interested_ in the mechanical aspect of reality, and describes it quite regardless of other evident aspects and without meaning to prejudice them. It is unfortunately true that the scientist has rarely been clear in his own mind on this point. It is only recently that he has partially freed himself from the habit of construing his terms as final and exhaustive.[137:5] This he was able to do even to his own satisfaction, only by allowing loose rein to the imagination. Consider the example of the atomic theory. In order to describe such occurrences as chemical combination, or changes in volume and density, the scientist has employed as a unit the least particle, physically indivisible and qualitatively h.o.m.ogeneous. Look for the atom in the body of science, and you will find it in physical laws governing expansion and contraction, and in chemical formulas. There the real responsibility of science ends. But whether through the need of popular exposition, or the undisciplined imagination of the investigator himself, atoms have figured in the history of thought as round corpuscles of a grayish hue scurrying hither and thither, and armed with special appliances wherewith to lock in molecular embrace. Although this is nonsense, we need not on that account conclude that there are no atoms. There are atoms in precisely the sense intended by scientific law, in that the formulas computed with the aid of this concept are true of certain natural processes. The conception of ether furnishes a similar case. Science is not responsible for the notion of a quivering gelatinous substance pervading s.p.a.ce, but only for certain laws that, _e. g._, describe the velocity of light in terms of the vibration. It is true that there is such a thing as ether, not as gratuitously rounded out by the imagination, with various attributes of immediate experience, but just in so far as this concept is employed in verified descriptions of radiation, magnetism, or electricity. Strictly speaking science a.s.serts nothing about the existence of ether, but only about the behavior, _e. g._, of light. If true descriptions of this and other phenomena are reached by employing units of wave propagation in an elastic medium, then ether is proved to exist in precisely the same sense that linear feet are proved to exist, if it be admitted that there are 90,000,000 x 5,280 of them between the earth and the sun. And to imagine in the one case a jelly with all the qualities of texture, color, and the like, that an individual object of sense would possess, is much the same as in the other to imagine the heavens filled with foot-rules and tape-measures. There is but one safe procedure in dealing with scientific concepts: to regard them as true so far as they describe, and no whit further. To supplement the strict meaning which has been verified and is contained in the formularies of science, with such vague predicates as will suffice to make ent.i.ties of them, is mere ineptness and confusion of thought. And it is only such a supplementation that obscures their abstractness. For a mechanical description of things, true as it doubtless is, is even more indubitably incomplete.