THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR IN RECONSTRUCTION OF PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy starts from some deep and wide way of responding to the
difficulties life presents, but it grows only when material is at hand
for making this practical response conscious, articulate and
communicable. Accompanying the economic, political and ecclesiastical
changes which were alluded to in an earlier lecture, was a scientific
revolution enormous in scope and leaving unchanged almost no detail of
belief about nature, physical and human. In part this scientific
transformation was produced by just the change in practical attitude and
temper. But as it progressed, it furnished that change an appropriate
vocabulary, congenial to its needs, and made it articulate. The advance
of science in its larger generalizations and in its specific detail of
fact supplied precisely that intellectual equipment of ideas and
concrete fact that was needed in order to formulate, precipitate,
communicate and propagate the new disposition. Today, accordingly, we
shall deal with those contrasting conceptions of the structure and
constitution of Nature, which when they are accepted on the authority
of science (alleged or real), form the intellectual framework of
philosophy.
_Contrasting_ conceptions of ancient and modern science have been
selected. For I see no way in which the truly philosophic import of the
picture of the world painted by modern science can be appreciated except
to exhibit it in contrast with that earlier picture which gave classic
metaphysics its intellectual foundation and confirmation. The world in
which philosophers once put their trust was a closed world, a world
consisting internally of a limited number of fixed forms, and having
definite boundaries externally. The world of modern science is an open
world, a world varying indefinitely without the possibility of
assignable limit in its internal make-up, a world stretching beyond any
assignable bounds externally. Again, the world in which even the most
intelligent men of olden times thought they lived was a fixed world, a
realm where changes went on only within immutable limits of rest and
permanence, and a world where the fixed and unmoving was, as we have
already noted, higher in quality and authority than the moving and
altering. And in the third place, the world which men once saw with
their eyes, portrayed in their imaginations and repeated in their plans
of conduct, was a world of a limited number of classes, kinds, forms,
distinct in quality (as kinds and species must be distinct) and
arranged in a graded order of superiority and inferiority.
It is not easy to recall the image of the universe which was taken for
granted in the world tradition. In spite of its dramatic rendering (as
in Dante), of the dialectical elaborations of Aristotle and St. Thomas,
in spite of the fact that it held men's minds captive until the last
three hundred years, and that its overthrow involved a religious
upheaval, it is already dim, faded and remote. Even as a separate and
abstract thing of theory it is not easy to recover.
As something pervasive, interwoven with all the details of reflection
and observation, with the plans and rules of behavior, it is impossible
to call it back again. Yet, as best we can, we need to put before our
minds a definitely enclosed universe, something which can be called a
universe in a literal and visible sense, having the earth at its fixed
and unchanging centre and at a fixed circumference the heavenly arch of
fixed stars moving in an eternal round of divine ether, hemming in all
things and keeping them forever at one and in order. The earth, though
at the centre, is the coarsest, grossest, most material, least
significant and good (or perfect) of the parts of this closed world. It
is the scene of maximum fluctuation and vicissitude. It is the least
rational, and therefore the least notable, or knowable; it offers the
least to reward contemplation, provoke admiration and govern conduct.
Between this grossly material centre and the immaterial, spiritual and
eternal heavens lie a definite series of regions of moon, planets, sun,
etc., each of which gains in rank, value, rationality and true being as
it is farther from earth and nearer the heavens. Each of these regions
is composed of its own appropriate stuff of earth, water, air, fire in
its own dominant degree, until we reach the heavenly firmament which
transcends all these principles, being constituted, as was just said, of
that immaterial, inalterable energy called ether.
Within this tight and pent in universe, changes take place of course.
But they are only of a small number of fixed kinds; and they operate
only within fixed limits. Each kind of stuff has its own appropriate
motion. It is the nature of earthly things to be heavy, since they are
gross, and hence to move downward. Fire and superior things are light
and hence move upward to their proper place; air rises only to the plane
of the planets, where it then takes its back and forth motion which
naturally belongs to it, as is evident in the winds and in respiration.
Ether being the highest of all physical things has a purely circular
movement. The daily return of the fixed stars is the closest possible
approximation to eternity, and to the self-involved revolution of mind
upon its own ideal axis of reason. Upon the earth in virtue of its
earthly nature--or rather its lack of virtue--is a scene of mere
change. Mere flux, aimless and meaningless, starts at no definite point
and arrives at nothing, amounts to nothing. Mere changes of quantity,
all purely mechanical changes, are of this kind. They are like the
shiftings of the sands by the sea. They may be sensed, but they cannot
be "noted" or understood; they lack fixed limits which govern them. They
are contemptible. They are casual, the sport of accident.
Only changes which lead to some defined or fixed outcome of form are of
any account and can have any account--any _logos_ or reason--made of
them. The growth of plants and animals illustrates the highest kind of
change which is possible in the sublunary or mundane sphere. They go
from one definite fixed form to another. Oaks generate only oaks,
oysters only oysters, man only man. The material factor of mechanical
production enters in, but enters in as accident to prevent the full
consummation of the type of the species, and to bring about the
meaningless variations which diversify various oaks or oysters from one
another; or in extreme cases to produce freaks, sports, monsters,
three-handed or four-toed men. Aside from accidental and undesirable
variations, each individual has a fixed career to pursue, a fixed path
in which to travel. Terms which sound modern, words like potentiality
and development abound in Aristotelian thought, and have misled some
into reading into his thought modern meanings. But the significance of
these words in classic and medieval thought is rigidly determined by
their context. Development holds merely of the course of changes which
takes place within a particular member of the species. It is only a name
for the predetermined movement from the acorn to the oak tree. It takes
place not in things generally but only in some one of the numerically
insignificant members of the oak species. Development, evolution, never
means, as in modern science, origin of new forms, a mutation from an old
species, but only the monotonous traversing of a previously plotted
cycle of change. So potentiality never means, as in modern life, the
possibility of novelty, of invention, of radical deviation, but only
that principle in virtue of which the acorn becomes the oak.
Technically, it is the capacity for movement between opposites. Only the
cold can become hot; only the dry can become wet; only the babe can
become a man; the seed the full-grown wheat and so on. Potentiality
instead of implying the emergence of anything novel means merely the
facility with which a particular thing repeats the recurrent processes
of its kind, and thus becomes a specific case of the eternal forms in
and through which all things are constituted.
In spite of the almost infinite numerical diversity of individuals,
there are only a limited number of species, kinds or sorts. And the
world is essentially a world which falls into sorts; it is pre-arranged
into distinct classes. Moreover, just as we naturally arrange plants and
animals into series, ranks and grades, from the lower to the highest, so
with all things in the universe. The distinct classes to which things
belong by their very nature form a hierarchical order. There are castes
in nature. The universe is constituted on an aristocratic, one can truly
say a feudal, plan. Species, classes do not mix or overlap--except in
cases of accident, and to the result of chaos. Otherwise, everything
belongs in advance to a certain class, and the class has its own fixed
place in the hierarchy of Being. The universe is indeed a tidy spot
whose purity is interfered with only by those irregular changes in
individuals which are due to the presence of an obdurate matter that
refuses to yield itself wholly to rule and form. Otherwise it is a
universe with a fixed place for everything and where everything knows
its place, its station and class, and keeps it. Hence what are known
technically as final and formal causes are supreme, and efficient causes
are relegated to an inferior place. The so-called final cause is just a
name for the fact that there is some fixed form characteristic of a
class or sort of things which governs the changes going on, so that they
tend toward it as their end and goal, the fulfilment of their true
nature. The supralunar region is the end or final cause of the proper
movements of air and fire; the earth of the motions of crass, heavy
things; the oak of the acorn; the mature form in general of the
germinal.
The "efficient cause," that which produces and instigates a movement is
only some external change as it accidentally gives a kind of push to an
immature, imperfect being and starts it moving toward its perfected or
fulfilled form. The final cause is the perfected form regarded as the
_explanation or reason_ of prior changes. When it is not taken in
reference to the changes completed and brought to rest in it, but in
itself it is the "formal cause": The inherent _nature_ or character
which "makes" or constitutes a thing _what it is_ so far as it truly
_is_, namely, what it is so far as it does not change. Logically and
practically all of the traits which have been enumerated cohere. Attack
one and you attack all. When any one is undermined, all go. This is the
reason why the intellectual modification of the last few centuries may
truly be called a revolution. It has substituted a conception of the
world differing at every point. It makes little matter at what point you
commence to trace the difference, you find yourself carried into all
other points.
Instead of a closed universe, science now presents us with one infinite
in space and time, having no limits here or there, at this end, so to
speak, or at that, and as infinitely complex in internal structure as
it is infinite in extent. Hence it is also an open world, an infinitely
variegated one, a world which in the old sense can hardly be called a
universe at all; so multiplex and far-reaching that it cannot be summed
up and grasped in any one formula. And change rather than fixity is now
a measure of "reality" or energy of being; change is omnipresent. The
laws in which the modern man of science is interested are laws of
motion, of generation and consequence. He speaks of law where the
ancients spoke of kind and essence, because what he wants is a
correlation of changes, an ability to detect one change occurring in
correspondence with another. He does not try to define and delimit
something remaining constant _in_ change. He tries to describe a
constant order _of_ change. And while the word "constant" appears in
both statements, the meaning of the word is not the same. In one case,
we are dealing with something constant in _existence_, physical or
metaphysical; in the other case, with something constant in _function_
and operation. One is a form of independent being; the other is a
formula of description and calculation of interdependent changes.
In short, classic thought accepted a feudally arranged order of classes
or kinds, each "holding" from a superior and in turn giving the rule of
conduct and service to an inferior. This trait reflects and parallels
most closely the social situation we were considering at the last hour.
We have a fairly definite notion of society as organized upon the feudal
basis. The family principle, the principle of kinship is strong, and
especially is this true as we ascend in the social scale. At the lower
end, individuals may be lost more or less in the mass. Since all are
parts of the common herd, there is nothing especial to distinguish their
birth. But among the privileged and ruling class the case is quite
different. The tie of kinship at once marks a group off externally and
gives it distinction, and internally holds all its members together.
Kinship, kind, class, genus are synonymous terms, starting from social
and concrete facts and going to the technical and abstract. For kinship
is a sign of a common nature, of something universal and permanent
running through all particular individuals, and giving them a real and
objective unity. Because such and such persons are kin they are
_really_, and not merely conventionally, marked off into a class having
something unique about it. All contemporary members are bound into an
objective unity which includes ancestors and descendants and excludes
all who belong to another kin or kind. Assuredly this parcelling out of
the world into separate kinds, each having its qualitatively distinct
nature in contrast with other species, binding numerically distinct
individuals together, and preventing their diversities from exceeding
fixed bounds, may without exaggeration be called a projection of the
family principle into the world at large.
In a feudally organized society, moreover, each kinship group or species
occupies a definite place. It is marked by the possession of a specific
_rank_ higher or lower with respect to other grades. This position
confers upon it certain privileges, enabling it to enforce certain
claims upon those lower in the scale and entailing upon it certain
services and homage to be rendered to superiors. The relationship of
causation, so to speak, is up and down. Influence, power, proceeds from
above to below; the activities of the inferior are performed with
respect, quite literally, to what is above. Action and reaction are far
from being equal and in opposite directions. All action is of one sort,
of the nature of lordship, and proceeds from the higher to the lower.
Reaction is of the nature of subjection and deference and proceeds from
lower to higher. The classic theory of the constitution of the world
corresponds point by point to this ordering of classes in a scale of
dignity and power.
A third trait assigned by historians to feudalism is that the ordering
of ranks centres about armed service and the relationship of armed
defense and protection. I am afraid that what has already been said
about the parallelism of ancient cosmology with social organization may
seem a fanciful analogy; and if a comparison is also drawn in this last
regard, there will be no doubt in your minds that a metaphor is being
forced. Such is truly the case if we take the comparison too literally.
But not so, if we confine our attention to the notion of rule and
command implied in both. Attention has already been called to the
meaning that is now given the term law--a constant relationship among
changes. Nevertheless, we often hear about laws which "govern" events,
and it often seems to be thought that phenomena would be utterly
disorderly were there not laws to keep them in order. This way of
thinking is a survival of reading social relationships into nature--not
necessarily a feudal relationship, but the relation of ruler and ruled,
sovereign and subject. Law is assimilated to a command or order. If the
factor of personal will is eliminated (as it was in the best Greek
thought) still the idea of law or universal is impregnated with the
sense of a guiding and ruling influence exerted from above on what is
naturally inferior to it. The universal governs as the end and model
which the artisan has in mind "governs" his movements. The Middle Ages
added to this Greek idea of control the idea of a command proceeding
from a superior will; and hence thought of the operations of nature as
if they were a fulfilment of a task set by one who had authority to
direct action.
The traits of the picture of nature drawn by modern science fairly
spring by contrast into high relief. Modern science took its first step
when daring astronomers abolished the distinction of high, sublime and
ideal forces operating in the heavens from lower and material forces
actuating terrestrial events. The supposed heterogeneity of substances
and forces between heaven and earth was denied. It was asserted that the
same laws hold everywhere, that there is homogeneity of material and
process everywhere throughout nature. The remote and esthetically
sublime is to be scientifically described and explained in terms of
homely familiar events and forces. The material of direct handling and
observation is that of which we are surest; it is the better known.
Until we can convert the grosser and more superficial observations of
far-away things in the heavens into elements identical with those of
things directly at hand, they remain blind and not understood. Instead
of presenting superior worth, they present only problems. They are not
means of enlightenment but challenges. The earth is not superior in rank
to sun, moon and stars, but it is equal in dignity, and its occurrences
give the key to the understanding of celestial existences. Being _at_
hand, they are also capable of being brought _under_ our hand; they can
be manipulated, broken up, resolved into elements which can be managed,
combined at will in old and new forms. The net result may be termed, I
think, without any great forcing, the substitution of a democracy of
individual facts equal in rank for the feudal system of an ordered
gradation of general classes of unequal rank.
One important incident of the new science was the destruction of the
idea that the earth is the centre of the universe. When the idea of a
fixed centre went, there went with it the idea of a closed universe and
a circumscribing heavenly boundary. To the Greek sense, just because its
theory of knowing was dominated by esthetic considerations, the finite
was the perfect. Literally, the finite was the finished, the ended, the
completed, that with no ragged edges and unaccountable operations. The
infinite or limitless was lacking in character just because it was
in-finite. Being everything, it was nothing. It was unformed and
chaotic, uncontrolled and unruly, the source of incalculable deviations
and accidents. Our present feeling that associates infinity with
boundless power, with capacity for expansion that knows no end, with the
delight in a progress that has no external limit, would be
incomprehensible were it not that interest has shifted from the esthetic
to the practical; from interest in beholding a harmonious and complete
scene to interest in transforming an inharmonious one. One has only to
read the authors of the transition period, say Giordano Bruno, to
realize what a pent-in, suffocating sensation they associated with a
closed, finite world, and what a feeling of exhilaration, expansion and
boundless possibility was aroused in them by the thought of a world
infinite in stretch of space and time, and composed internally of
infinitesimal infinitely numerous elements. That which the Greeks
withdrew from with repulsion they welcomed with an intoxicated sense of
adventure. The infinite meant, it was true, something forever
untraversed even by thought, and hence something forever unknown--no
matter how great attainment in learning. But this "forever unknown"
instead of being chilling and repelling was now an inspiring challenge
to ever-renewed inquiry, and an assurance of inexhaustible possibilities
of progress.
The student of history knows well that the Greeks made great progress in
the science of mechanics as well as of geometry. At first sight, it
appears strange that with this advance in mechanics so little advance
was made in the direction of modern science. The seeming paradox impels
us to ask why it was that mechanics remained a separate science, why it
was not used in description and explanation of natural phenomena after
the manner of Galileo and Newton. The answer is found in the social
parallelism already mentioned. Socially speaking, machines, tools, were
devices employed by artisans. The science of mechanics had to do with
the kind of things employed by human mechanics, and mechanics were base
fellows. They were at the lower end of the social scale, and how could
light on the heavens, the highest, be derived from them? The application
of considerations of mechanics to natural phenomena would moreover have
implied an interest in the practical control and utilization of
phenomena which was totally incompatible with the importance attached to
final causes as fixed determiners of nature. All the scientific
reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries strikingly agree in
regarding the doctrine of final causes as _the_ cause of the failure of
science. Why? Because this doctrine taught that the processes of nature
are held in bondage to certain fixed ends which they must tend to
realize. Nature was kept in leading strings; it was cramped down to
production of a limited number of stereotyped results. Only a
comparatively small number of things could be brought into being, and
these few must be similar to the ends which similar cycles of change had
effected in the past. The scope of inquiry and understanding was limited
to the narrow round of processes eventuating in the fixed ends which the
observed world offered to view. At best, invention and production of new
results by use of machines and tools must be restricted to articles of
transient dignity and bodily, not intellectual, use.
When the rigid clamp of fixed ends was taken off from nature,
observation and imagination were emancipated, and experimental control
for scientific and practical purposes enormously stimulated. Because
natural processes were no longer restricted to a fixed number of
immovable ends or results, anything might conceivably happen. It was
only a question of what elements could be brought into juxtaposition so
that they would work upon one another. Immediately, mechanics ceased to
be a separate science and became an organ for attacking nature. The
mechanics of the lever, wheel, pulley and inclined plane told accurately
what happens when things in space are used to move one another during
definite periods of time. The whole of nature became a scene of pushes
and pulls, of cogs and levers, of motions of parts or elements to which
the formulae of movements produced by well-known machines were directly
applicable.
The banishing of ends and forms from the universe has seemed to many an
ideal and spiritual impoverishment. When nature was regarded as a set of
mechanical interactions, it apparently lost all meaning and purpose. Its
glory departed. Elimination of differences of quality deprived it of
beauty. Denial to nature of all inherent longings and aspiring
tendencies toward ideal ends removed nature and natural science from
contact with poetry, religion and divine things. There seemed to be left
only a harsh, brutal despiritualized exhibition of mechanical forces. As
a consequence, it has seemed to many philosophers that one of their
chief problems was to reconcile the existence of this purely mechanical
world with belief in objective rationality and purpose--to save life
from a degrading materialism. Hence many sought to re-attain by way of
an analysis of the process of knowing, or epistemology, that belief in
the superiority of Ideal Being which had anciently been maintained on
the basis of cosmology. But when it is recognized that the mechanical
view is determined by the requirements of an experimental control of
natural energies, this problem of reconciliation no longer vexes us.
Fixed forms and ends, let us recall, mark fixed limits to change. Hence
they make futile all human efforts to produce and regulate change except
within narrow and unimportant limits. They paralyze constructive human
inventions by a theory which condemns them in advance to failure. Human
activity can conform only to ends already set by nature. It was not till
ends were banished from nature that purposes became important as factors
in human minds capable of reshaping existence. A natural world that does
not subsist for the sake of realizing a fixed set of ends is relatively
malleable and plastic; it may be used for this end _or_ that. That
nature can be known through the application of mechanical formulae is
the prime condition of turning it to human account. Tools, machines are
means to be utilized. Only when nature is regarded as mechanical, is
systematic invention and construction of machines relevant to nature's
activities. Nature is subdued to human purpose because it is no longer
the slave of metaphysical and theological purpose.
Bergson has pointed out that man might well be called _Homo Faber_. He
is distinguished as the tool-making animal. This has held good since man
was man; but till nature was construed in mechanical terms, the making
of tools with which to attack and transform nature was sporadic and
accidental. Under such circumstances it would not have occurred even to
a Bergson that man's tool-making capacity was so important and
fundamental that it could be used to define him. The very things that
make the nature of the mechanical-physical scientist esthetically blank
and dull are the things which render nature amenable to human control.
When qualities were subordinated to quantitative and mathematical
relationships, color, music and form disappeared from the object of the
scientist's inquiry as such. But the remaining properties of weight,
extension, numerable velocity of movement and so on were just the
qualities which lent themselves to the substitution of one thing for
another, to the conversion of one form of energy into another; to the
effecting of transformations. When chemical fertilizers can be used in
place of animal manures, when improved grain and cattle can be
purposefully bred from inferior animals and grasses, when mechanical
energy can be converted into heat and electricity into mechanical
energy, man gains power to manipulate nature. Most of all he gains power
to frame _new_ ends and aims and to proceed in regular system to their
actualization. Only indefinite substitution and convertibility
regardless of quality render nature manageable. The mechanization of
nature is the condition of a practical and progressive idealism in
action.
It thus turns out that the old, old dread and dislike of matter as
something opposed to mind and threatening it, to be kept within the
narrowest bounds of recognition; something to be denied so far as
possible lest it encroach upon ideal purposes and finally exclude them
from the real world, is as absurd practically as it was impotent
intellectually. Judged from the only scientific standpoint, what it does
and how it functions, matter means conditions. To respect matter means
to respect the conditions of achievement; conditions which hinder and
obstruct and which have to be changed, conditions which help and further
and which can be used to modify obstructions and attain ends. Only as
men have learned to pay sincere and persistent regard to matter, to the
conditions upon which depends negatively and positively the success of
all endeavor, have they shown sincere and fruitful respect for ends and
purposes. To profess to have an aim and then neglect the means of its
execution is self-delusion of the most dangerous sort. Education and
morals will begin to find themselves on the same road of advance that
say chemical industry and medicine have found for themselves when they
too learn fully the lesson of wholehearted and unremitting attention to
means and conditions--that is, to what mankind so long despised as
material and mechanical. When we take means for ends we indeed fall into
moral materialism. But when we take ends without regard to means we
degenerate into sentimentalism. In the name of the ideal we fall back
upon mere luck and chance and magic or exhortation and preaching; or
else upon a fanaticism that will force the realization of preconceived
ends at any cost.
I have touched in this lecture upon many things in a cursory way. Yet
there has been but one point in mind. The revolution in our conceptions
of nature and in our methods of knowing it has bred a new temper of
imagination and aspiration. It has confirmed the new attitude generated
by economic and political changes. It has supplied this attitude with
definite intellectual material with which to formulate and justify
itself.
In the first lecture it was noted that in Greek life prosaic matter of
fact or empirical knowledge was at a great disadvantage as compared with
the imaginative beliefs that were bound up with special institutions
and moral habitudes. Now this empirical knowledge has grown till it has
broken its low and limited sphere of application and esteem. It has
itself become an organ of inspiring imagination through introducing
ideas of boundless possibility, indefinite progress, free movement,
equal opportunity irrespective of fixed limits. It has reshaped social
institutions, and in so far developed a new morale. It has achieved
ideal values. It is convertible into creative and constructive
philosophy.
Convertible, however, rather than already converted. When we consider
how deeply embedded in customs of thought and action the classic
philosophy came to be and how congenial it is to man's more spontaneous
beliefs, the throes that attended its birth are not to be wondered at.
We should rather wonder that a view so upsetting, so undermining, made
its way without more persecutions, martyrdoms and disturbances. It
certainly is not surprising that its complete and consistent formulation
in philosophy has been long delayed. The main efforts of thinkers were
inevitably directed to minimizing the shock of change, easing the
strains of transition, mediating and reconciling. When we look back upon
almost all of the thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
upon all excepting those who were avowedly sceptical and revolutionary,
what strikes us is the amount of traditional subject-matter and method
that is to be found even among those who were regarded as most advanced.
Men cannot easily throw off their old habits of thinking, and never can
throw off all of them at once. In developing, teaching and receiving new
ideas we are compelled to use some of the old ones as tools of
understanding and communication. Only piecemeal, step-by-step, could the
full import of the new science be grasped. Roughly speaking, the
seventeenth century witnessed its application in astronomy and general
cosmology; the eighteenth century in physics and chemistry; the
nineteenth century undertook an application in geology and the
biological sciences.
It was said that it has now become extremely difficult to recover the
view of the world which universally obtained in Europe till the
seventeenth century. Yet after all we need only recur to the science of
plants and animals as it was before Darwin and to the ideas which even
now are dominant in moral and political matters to find the older order
of conceptions in full possession of the popular mind. Until the dogma
of fixed unchangeable types and species, of arrangement in classes of
higher and lower, of subordination of the transitory individual to the
universal or kind had been shaken in its hold upon the science of life,
it was impossible that the new ideas and method should be made at home
in social and moral life. Does it not seem to be the intellectual task
of the twentieth century to take this last step? When this step is taken
the circle of scientific development will be rounded out and the
reconstruction of philosophy be made an accomplished fact.