I begin with the question that concludes the third essay: “How can it
be possible for faith and science to possess opposed conceptions when
both actually start out from one and the same given thing, the world?”
All that exists presents itself on one hand as “something that is,” and
on the other as “something that happens”--that is to say, as something
found in a state of perpetual change, as processes.
Where something happens, there adequate causes must be present. These
adequate causes must be forces.
All processes--_i.e._ the entire play of world-events--fall into two
great classes: those _that are maintained_, dead processes, and those
_that maintain themselves_, living processes; the latter presenting
themselves, on the one hand, as processes of combustion, as flame, and
on the other as processes of alimentation, as living beings.
All dead processes can be interpreted or read as falls. Their type is
the falling stone. A stone does not fall because of an indwelling force
that causes its falling; it only falls because it has previously been
raised, because between it and the surface of the earth there exists
a difference of tension. Its fall thus signifies that force must have
been present, in the sense that it must _previously_ have been active;
for otherwise the difference in position of stone and surface of the
earth could never have come about. When physics interprets the fall
of the stone in differing fashion--namely, by having it caused by the
attractive force of the earth’s surface in action during the fall--this
is purely a working hypothesis, advanced solely in the interest of a
uniform physical world-theory.
To much the same effect as the falling stone, every physical happening
without exception is to be interpreted or read, whether it concern
mechanical, chemical, thermal, electrical, magnetic, or any other
such-like phenomena. All alike are to be taken as falls from places of
higher to places of lower tension. The import of each and all is only
that forces, actuating impulsions, _must once have been present_. In
each case we really have to do not with actions but with reactions.
The proof that no actual forces are here at work is to be found in the
fact that the process ceases so soon as the differences of tension are
adjusted.
This world of reactions is the given province of all science.
Science, because bent upon furnishing demonstration, has a title to
existence only where there is nothing that is not perceptible to sense.
Where there are actual living processes, there _actual forces must be
present_. A force, however, can never be perceptible to sense; for
everything perceptible to sense necessitates the question as to its
adequate cause--that is, as to the force in virtue of which it exists.
Where there are dead, re-actual processes, there forces are not in
action themselves, and hence force is not a real but only a conceptual
necessity, a mere logical presumption. Hence also in the interpretation
of this re-actual world, it is always possible to slur over, to
eliminate the question as to actual forces, and to replace these latter
by the various differences of tension, of potentiality, and thus remain
wholly within the domain of the sensible.
Such a position is quite permissible to a science that devotes itself
exclusively to technique, _i.e._ aims at nothing more than to measure
and calculate in advance, for it is only re-actual proceedings that
admit of being measured and calculated in advance. When such and such a
planet will occupy such and such a position in the heavens, this admits
of being calculated beforehand with the most perfect accuracy. But
whether this next moment I shall twirl my thumb to the right or to the
left, that no science, no academy in the world can compute in advance.
The position which science takes up towards the world--a rejection
in principle of all that is not perceptible to sense--of necessity
involves restriction to the re-actual world, and therewith the
mechanical conception of the play of world-events.
Yet once more. This conception is perfectly legitimate so long as it
confines itself to the re-actual world. But it becomes an anomaly the
moment it seeks to pass beyond this re-actual world--the moment a man
tries to read the actual world, the living processes, according to
the same scheme--that of a falling. For here it is actual forces that
are at work; here the question as to actual forces declines to be
eliminated or exempted by acts of intellectual violence that by their
repugnancy to common sense bring about their own downfall. Later on we
shall have to revert to these attempts to interpret physically living
beings, the entire man as a falling, a mere process of adjustment,
and to explain consciousness in purely mechanical fashion. Though one
should be able to “read” the animal organism after physical formulas
in never so far-reaching a manner, though one should be able to
co-ordinate the whole process of alimentation, the housekeeping of
life, in never so perfect a fashion with the law of the conservation of
energy, nothing has been gained withal that might settle the question
as to what exactly that is which keeps this mechanism going: such
a question is never once touched on at all; nay, by this method of
procedure it is deliberately pushed on one side, as much and as long
as ever is possible, until straightforward, natural thinking rises
in revolt against such behaviour as a learned pastime and demands
actuality.