Limitations or opportunities? Error or truth? In the familiar
illustration the tracks which limit the locomotive to a certain course
are essential to its successful movement, and something of the same kind
may be true of science. A man's vices and virtues are never really far
apart, and, again, the same may be true of science. But for the moment
we are to approach science from the standpoint of its limitations; we
are to see how its own natural ideals, as suggested by our
characterization of the scientific view, are evidence of its inadequacy.
So doing we shall take a most important step towards a thorough-going
confession of doubt.
Among scientific men it is a commonplace that for accuracy and
genuineness or purity, that is to say for complete abstraction, science
must be (1) independent of "life," all the subjective interests, whether
personal or social, the interests of politics, industry, morality, or
religion, being science's most unsettling influences; (2) specialistic,
the "Jack of all trades" in science being anything but _persona grata_
among scientific men; and (3) agnostic or "positivistic," all conceits
[p.075] about what is beyond positive experience, and even all dogma
about what seems really present to experience, being most arrant heresy;
and every one of these ideals, besides being derived from the habits or
instincts, commonly unrecognized and unappreciated, of the ordinary
consciousness, is wholly in accord with the conclusions of the preceding
chapter. The attitude of science, as there disclosed, involved a looking
to an external world--the objectivism; a division of the field--the
specialism; and an experimental, adventurous mind--the agnosticism or
positivism. It involved other things, too, but these three are now
selected, so to speak, as three determining points of science's
circumference. Consideration of them, to whatever results it may lead,
should meet all the demands of the present task. As for the results,
these will show fundamental difficulties, very like to those of ordinary
experience, to lurk in each one of the three ideals. The scientific
consciousness is abstract and just for being in consequence
objectivistic, specialistic, and agnostic it is artificial and unreal,
though perhaps only relatively or not unmixedly unreal, and especially
it is honeycombed with paradoxes and contradictions, with the translated
but not transcended contradictions of ordinary life.
To the examination, therefore, of these difficulties, or limitations, we
must now turn, taking the three ideals in order.