THE SCIENCES AND PHILOSOPHY.
By asserting the rights of philosophy against the dogmatism of
self-inspired 'unphilosophy,' and by maintaining that we must not feel
the truth, with our eyes as it were closed, but must open them full
upon it, Hegel does not reduce philosophy to the level of one of the
finite sciences. The name 'finite,' like the name 'empirical,' is not
a title of which the sciences have any cause to be ashamed. They are
called empirical, because it is their glory and their strength to found
upon experience. They are called finite, because they have a fixed
object, which they must expect and cannot alter; because they have an
end and a beginning,--presupposing something where they begin, and
leaving something for the sciences which come after. Botany rests upon
the researches of chemistry: and astronomy hands over the record of
cosmical movements to geology. Science is interlinked with science; and
each of them is a fragment. Nor can these fragments ever, in the strict
sense of the word, make up a whole or total. They have broken off,
sometimes by accident, and sometimes for convenience, from one another.
The sciences have budded forth here and there upon the tree of popular
knowledge and ordinary consciousness, as the interest and needs of the
time drew attention closer to various points and objects in the world
surrounding us.
Prosecute the popular knowledge about any point far enough,
substituting completeness and accuracy for vagueness, and especially
giving numerical definiteness in weight, size, and figure, until
the little drop of fact has grown into an ocean, and the mere germ
has expanded into a structure with complex interconnexion,--and
you will have a science. By its point of origin this luminous body
of facts is united to the great circle of human knowledge and
ignorance. Each special science is a part, which presupposes a total
of much lower organisation, but much wider range than itself: each
branch of scientific knowledge grows out of the already existent
tree of acquaintance with things. But the part very soon assumes an
independence of its own, and adopts a hostile or negative attitude
towards the general level of unscientific opinion. This process of what
we may, from the vulgar point of view, call abnormal development, is
repeated irregularly at various points along the surface of ordinary
consciousness. At one time it is the celestial movements calling for
the science of astronomy: at another the problem of dividing the soil
calling for the geometrician. Each of these outgrowths naturally
re-acts and modifies the whole range of human knowledge, or what we
may call popular science; and thus, while keeping up its own life, it
quickens the parent stock with an infusion of new vigour, and raises
the general intelligence to a higher level and into a higher element.
The order of the outcome of the sciences in time, therefore, and their
connexions with one another, cannot be explained or understood, if we
look only to the sciences themselves. We must first of all descend
into the depths of natural thought, or of general culture, and trace
the lines which unite science with science in that general medium. The
systematic interdependence of the sciences must be chiefly sought for
in the workings of thought as a whole in its popular phases, and in the
action and reaction of that _general_ human thought with the sciences,
those definite organisations of knowledge which form sporadically round
the _nuclei_ here and there presented in what would superficially be
described as the inorganic mass and medium of popular knowledge. Thus,
by means of the sciences in their aggregate action, the material of
common consciousness is expanded and developed, at least in certain
parts, though the expansion may be neither consistent nor systematic.
But so long as this work is incomplete, so long, that is to say, as
every point in the line of popular knowledge has not received its due
elaboration and equal study, the sciences merely succeed each other in
a certain imperfect sequence, or exist in juxtaposition: they do not
form a total. The whole of scientific knowledge will only be formed,
when science shall be as completely rounded and unified, as in its
lower sphere and more inadequate element the ordinary consciousness of
the world is now.
Up to a certain point the method of science is but the method of
ordinary consciousness pursued knowingly and steadily. But ere long
the method acquires a distinctive character of its own. It shakes
off the pressure of that immediate subservience in which ordinary
knowledge stands to man's needs, wishes and interests. Knowledge
is pursued--within a wide range--for its own sake, and by a class
more or less definitely set apart by humanity for its scientific
service,--which is thus performed more systematically and continuously.
But the great step which carries ordinary knowledge into its higher
region is the discovery, due to reflection and comparison, that
there is a double grade of reality-a permanent, essential, uniform,
substantial being, which is contrasted with an evanescent, apparent,
varying and accidental. To know a thing is in all cases to _relate it_
to something else: to know it in the higher sense_--vere scire_--is
to relate it to its essence, its substantial or universal form, its
permanent self. Ordinary knowledge, e. g., fixes a thing by referring
to its antecedents: scientific knowledge refers it to its 'invariable,
'unconditional' or 'essential' antecedent,--to something which
contains it implicitly, and necessarily, and is not merely by accident
or juxtaposition associated with it. To discover this permanent,
underlying substance or reality comes to be the problem of science--a
problem which may be taken in the widest generality, or restricted
to some one group of existences. What is asked for, e.g., may be
the uniformity and essence in the appearance of the diurnal journey
of the sun, or it may be the underlying, invisible, nature which
displays itself in all the variety of minerals, and in animal and plant
life. The one-and-the-same in a diversity of many; the type-form in
individuals: the cause which is the key to understanding an effect that
always and unconditionally follows it; the force which finds different
expression in actions--are what Science seeks.
In that search two points emerge as regards the method. The first is
the importance of quantitative statements or numerical appreciations,
and the general law that variations in the qualitative are in some
ratio concomitant with variations in the quantitative. Mathematics,
in a word, is found to be an invaluable instrument for recording
with accuracy the minutest as well as the most immense differences
of quality. First, it is seen that qualitative differences within a
given range, e.g. various colours or various musical notes, can be
accurately expressed by a numerical ratio. But, secondly, it soon
appears that even greater divergences of quality, e.g. those of colour
and of chemical quality, may possibly be reduced to stages on one
quantitative scale. It is not unnatural that such experiences should
give rise to a hope--and in sanguine minds, an assurance--that all the
phenomena of nature are ultimately phases of some common nature--some
elementary being--which runs through an infinite gamut of numerically
defined adjustments.
But the numerical prepossession--as we may call it--creates another
assumption. Every number consists of units: every cube can be regarded
as an aggregation of smaller cubes, and in measurement is (implicitly
at least) so regarded. Transferring this to the physical world, every
object is regarded as a composite--a Large, made up by the addition
and juxtaposition of many (relatively) Littles. The essentials of the
composite are here the elements that compose it: these, by a natural
tendency, we proceed to conceive as remaining always unchanged, and
giving rise by their peculiar juxtaposition to certain perceptions in
the human being. You whirl rapidly a blazing piece of wood, and instead
of a discontinuous series of flashes you see one orbit of luminous
matter: or, let falling rain-drops take up a particular position in
reference to your eyes and the sun, and a rainbow is visible. In both
cases there is what may be called an illusion--the illusion, above
all, of unity and continuity. Now what is in these cases obviously
and demonstrably seen, is, as Leibniz in particular has reminded us,
the general law of all matter as such. In the extended and material
world there is nowhere a real unity discoverable. The small is made
up of the smaller _ad infinitum_[1]. But the conclusion (which
Leibniz drew)--that unity belongs only to v,' Monads and never by any
possibility to a material substance, was not that commonly reached
or accepted. There are--or there must be,--said the prevalent creed,
ultimates, indivisibles, indecomposables, simples, atoms. These are the
final bricks of reality, out of which the apparent universe is built:
each with a maximum,--a _ne plus ultra_--of resistibility, hardness,
fullness, and unsqueezable bulk.
Into further details of these ultimate irreducibles we need not enter.
It is sufficient to denote the general purport of the conception, and
the tendency it implies.
In these ultimates supreme reality is understood to lie; and on them
at last, and indeed always, rests whatever reality truly exists in
any object. All else is secondary--and, comparatively speaking,
illusory,--unreal. Any phenomena that may be noted only affect the
surface or show of these reals: the inner reality continues one
and unchanged. Outside them, around them, is the void--emptiness,
non-entity. Yet null and void as it may be, we may, in passing,
reply,--this circumambient is the source of all that gives these
masses of atoms any distinctive reality--any character of true being.
Space may be empty enough,--a mere spectre-shell; and yet it is their
differences in spatial circumstance that bring out and actualise what
they implicitly are. These '_individua_' these units of reality, these
atoms, are real and knowable only in their relations. So too Time may
be contemptuously treated as a passive receptacle: yet it is only by
its connexions in the past and the future that the present moment has
any actuality it may claim. And time and space are potent agencies--in
popular mode of utterance--whatever the mechanical philosophy may say.
But all of these relations are in the realm of unreality. The atoms
alone _are_: and yet the void, which ought _not_ to _be,_ in an
unmistakable way _is_ also. To this mysterious vacuum which lies
outside (and yet not outside) reality, to this not-being which _is,_
there can only be given a half-negative and baffling name. Let it
be called Chance--or let it be called Necessity; let it be called
inexplicable Law of co-existence and sequence,--the Force which is the
beginning of motion. It is the ultimate key to the mystery--but it is
at least a key which no human hand can use, or even lay hold of. It is
enough for science if, leaving this ultimate inexplicability untouched,
it trace in each separate instance the exact equation between the sum
of the constituents and the total which they compose,--if it prove that
the several items when put together exactly give the sum proposed.
Identification--the establishment of quantitative equations--is the
work of science. Identity is its canon, working on the presumption
or axiom that there can be nothing in the result which was not in
the antecedents or conditions. _Ex nihilo nihil fit._ The quantity
of energy must always be the same, though its phases may vary, or
temporarily avoid detection. Matter, i.e. the ultimate reality, is
indestructible. In short, the method of analysis and synthesis, as that
of addition and subtraction, is a calculus which takes the form of an
equation.
So far the inorganic, inanimate world has been mainly in view. If we
now turn to the organisms, we find the popular creed expressed in the
adage _Omne vivum e vivo._ No eye has ever seen--though fanatical
observers have sometimes so deluded themselves as to think they saw--a
living being directly emerge from inorganic stuff. The saner student
of physiology contents himself with leaving for the while the crux of
the genesis of Life, and examining only the building up of the living
creature out of its constituents. Here the atom is called the cell:
every organism is a synthesis of cells, and in the cell we have the
primary element of organic reality: _Omnis cellula e cellula,_ In the
atom we have the ultimate element; in the cell a relative element,--the
absolute beginning of a new order of things,--which we may, if we
like, choose to treat (though only for logical simplicity's sake) as a
gradual development from the other and more primitive, but which, so
far as experience and history teach, is equally ultimate in its kind.
But be the final constituent (physical) atom, or (physiological) cell,
the relation of these constituents is at first conceived by science
only as composition, or mechanical synthesis. It is only gradually
that science begins to have doubts as to the inviolability and
unalterableness of the elements. When the idea--not altogether new--of
a 'latent meta-schematism' and latent process within the constituents
is entertained and carried out in earnest, science has passed on to a
new stage: from mechanical atomism to a dynamic and organic theory of
existence. And the governing ideas of scientific logic have then ceased
to be co-existence, and sequence, correlation and composition: the new
category is intus-susception, development, adaptation not only external
but internal.
_Divide et impera_ is the motto of Science. To isolate one thing
or one group of facts from its context,--to penetrate beneath the
apparent simplicity, which time and custom have taught ordinary eyes
to see in the concrete object, to the multitude of underlying simple
elements,--to leave everything extraneous out of sight,--to abolish the
teleology which imposes upon Nature a permanent tribute (direct or
indirect) towards the supply of human wants,--and to take, as it were,
one thing at a time and study it for itself disinterestedly; that is
the problem of the sciences. And to accomplish that end they do not
hesitate to break the charmed links which in common vision hold the
world together,--to disregard the spiritual harmony which the sense of
beauty finds in the scene,--to strip off the relations of means and
end, which reflection has thrown from thing to thing, and the sensuous
atmosphere of so-called 'secondary' qualities in which human sense has
enveloped each; and finally to sever its connexion by which
'the whole round world is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.'
In those days when reflection had not set in,--when humanity had not
yet found itself a stranger in the house of Nature, and had not yet
dared to regard her as a mere automatic slave, men had no doubts as to
the meaning of things. They lived sympathetically her life.
'Man, once descried, imprints for ever
His presence on all lifeless things: the winds
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,
A querulous mutter, or a quick gay laugh.'
To the extent of his abilities and his culture, indeed man has in all
ages read himself into the phenomena external to him. Such readings, in
times when he feared and loved his kinsfolk of Nature, were fetichism
and anthropomorphism. Gradually, however, forgetting his community, he
claimed to be the measure and master of all things: to decree their use
and function. But in course of time, when the sciences had emancipated
themselves from the yoke of philosophy, they refused to borrow any such
help in reading the riddle of the universe, and resolved to begin,
_ab ovo_, from the atom or cell, and leave the elements to work out
their own explanation. Modern science in so doing practises the lessons
learned from Spinoza and Hume. The former teaches that all conception
of order, i. e. of adaptation and harmony in nature, and indeed all
the methods by which nature is popularly explained, are only modes of
our emotional imagination, betraying how imperfect has been in most
of us the emancipation of human intellect from the servitude to the
affections[2]. The latter points out that all connexions between things
are solely mental associations, ingrained habits of expectation, the
work of time and custom, accredited only by experience[3]. There must
be no pre-suppositions allowed in the studies of science, no help
derived prematurely from the later terms in the process to elucidate
the earlier. Let man, it is said, be explained by those laws, and by
the action of those primary elements which build up every other part
of nature: let molecules by mechanical union construct the thinking
organism, and then construct society. The elements which we find by
analysis must be all that is required to make the synthesis. Thus in
modern times science carries out, fully and with the details of actual
knowledge in several branches, the principles of the atom and the void,
which Democritus suggested.
The scientific spirit, however, the spirit of analysis and abstraction
(or of 'Mediation' and 'Reflection'), is not confined in its
operations to the physical world. The criticism of ordinary beliefs
and conventions has been applied--and applied at an earlier period--to
what has been called the Spiritual world, to Art, Religion, Morality,
and the institutions of human Society. Under these names the agency of
ages, acting by their individual minds, has created organic systems,
unities which have claimed to be permanent, inviolable, and divine.
Such unities or organic structures are the Family, the State, the works
of Art, the forms, doctrines, and systems of Religion, existing and
recognised in ordinary consciousness. But in these cases, as in Nature,
the reflective principle may come forward and ask what right these
unities have to exist. This is the question which the 'Encyclopaedic,'
the 'Aufklärung,' the 'Rationalist' and 'Freethinking' theories,
raise and have raised in the last century and the present. What is
the Family, it is said, but a fiction or convention, which is used to
give a decent, but somewhat transparent covering to a certain animal
appetite, and its probable consequences? What is the State, and what
is Society, but a fiction or compact, by which the weak try to make
themselves seem strong, and the unjust seek to shelter themselves from
the consequences of their own injustice? What is Religion, it is said,
but a delusion springing from the fears and weakness of the crowd, and
the cunning of the few, which men have fostered until it has wrapped
humanity in its snaky coils? And Poetry, we are assured, like its
sister Arts, will perish and its illusions fade away, when Science,
now in the cradle, has become the full-grown Hercules. As for Morality
and Law, and the like, the same condemnation has been prepared from
of old. All of them, it is said, are but the inventions of power and
craft, or the phantoms of human imagination, which the strength of
positive science and bare facts is destined in no long time to dispel.
When they insisted upon a severance of the elements in the
vulgarly-accepted unities of the world, Science and Freethinking, like
Epicurus in an older day, have believed that they were liberating the
world from its various superstitions, from the bonds which instinct
and custom had fastened upon things so as to combine them into systems
more or less arbitrary. They denied the supremacy and reality of those
ideas which insist on the essential unity and self-sameness in things
that visibly and tangibly have a separate existence of their own, and
branded these ideas comprehensively as mysticism and metaphysics.
They sought to disabuse us of spirits, vital forces, divine right of
governments, final causes, _et hoc genus omne._ They were exceedingly
jealous for the independence of the individual, and for his right to
demand satisfaction for the questioning, ground-seeking faculty of
his nature. But while they did so they hardly realised how entirely
the spectator is the part, the product of what he surveys, and while
surveying treats as if it were but a spot or mark on the circumference
of the circle that lies--some way off--around him. 'Phenomenalism,' as
this mode of looking at things has been called, is false to life, and
would cut away the ground from philosophy.[4]
To some extent philosophy returns to the position of the wider
consciousness, to the general belief in harmony and symmetry. It
reverts to the unity or connexion, which the natural presumptions of
mankind find in the picture of the world. The _nolo philosophari_
of the intuitivist, in reaction from the supposed excesses of the
sciences, simply reverted to the bare re-statement of the popular
creed. If science, e. g., had shown that the perception of an
external world pre-supposed for its accomplishment an unsuspected
series of intermediate steps, the mere intuitivist simply denied
the intermediation by appealing to Common Sense, or to the natural
instincts and primary beliefs of mankind. Conviction and natural
instinct were declared to counterbalance the abstractions of science.
But philosophy which seeks to comprehend existence cannot take the
same ground as the intuitional school, or neglect the testimony of
science. If the spiritual unity of the world has been denied and lost
to sight, mere assertion that we feel and own its pervading power will
not do much good. It is necessary to reconcile the contrast between
the wholeness of the natural vision, and the fragmentary, but in its
fragments elaborated, result of science.
The sciences break up the rough generalisations or vulgar concepts of
everyday use, and make their fixed distinctions yield to analysis.
They thus render continuous things which were looked at as only
separate. But they tend again to substitute the results of their
analysis as a new and permanent distinction and principle of things.
They are like revolutionists who upset and perturb an old order, and
set up a new and minuter tyranny in its place. Gradually, the general
culture, the average educated intelligence gathers up the fruit of
scientific research into the total development of humanity: and uses
the work of science to fill up the _lacunae,_ the gaps, which make
popular consciousness so irregular and disconnected. A sort of popular
philosophy comes to sum up and estimate what science has accomplished:
and therein is as it were the spirit of the world taking into his own
hand the acquisitions won by the more audacious and self-willed of
his sons, and investing them in the common store. They are set aside
and preserved there, at first in an abstract and technical form, but
destined soon to pass into the possession of all, and form that mass of
belief and instinctive or implanted knowledge whence a new generation
will draw its mental supplies. Each great scientific discovery is in
its turn reduced to a part of the common stock. It leaves the technical
field, and spreads into the common life of men, becoming embodied in
their daily beliefs,--a seed of thought, from which, by the agency of
intelligent experience, new increments of science will one day spring.
Philosophy properly so called is also the unification of science,
but in a new sphere, a higher medium not recognised by the sciences
themselves. The reconciliation which the philosopher believes himself
to accomplish between ordinary consciousness and science is identified
by either side with a phase of its antagonist error. Science will
term philosophy a modified form of the old religious superstition.
The popular consciousness of truth, and especially religion, will
see in philosophy only a repetition or an aggravation of the evils
of science. The attempt at unity will not approve itself to either,
until they enter upon the ground which philosophy occupies, and move
in that element. And that elevation into the philosophic ether calls
for a tension of thought which is the sternest labour imposed upon
man: so that the continuous action of philosophising has been often
styled superhuman. If anywhere, it is in pure philosophy that proof
becomes impossible, unless for those who are willing to think for
themselves[5]. The philosophic lesson cannot be handed on to a mere
recipient: the result, when cut off from the process which produced
it, vanishes like the palace in the fairy tale.
'The whole of philosophy is nothing but the study of the specific
forms or types of unity.[6] There are many species and grades of this
unity. They are not merely to be enumerated and asserted in a vague
way, as they here and there force themselves upon the notice of the
popular mind. Philosophy sees in that unity neither an ultimate and
unanalysable fact, nor a deception, but a growth (which is also a
struggle), a revealing or unfolding, which issues in an organism or
system, constructing itself more and more completely by a force of its
own. This system formed by these types of the fundamental unity is
called the 'Idea,' of which the highest law is development. Philosophy
essays to do for this connective and unifying nature, i. e. for the
thought in things, something like what the sciences have done or
would like to do for the facts of sense and matter,--to do for the
spiritual binding-element in its integrity, what is being done for
the several facts which are more or less combined. It retraces the
universe of thought from its germinal form, where it seems, as it were,
an indecomposable point, to the fully matured system or organism, and
shows not merely that one phase of pure thought passes into another,
but how it does so, and yet is not lost, but subsists suspended and
deprived of its narrowness in the maturer phase.
[Footnote 1: Leibniz, ed. Gerhardt, iii. 507: 'Les atomes sont l'effet
de la foiblesse de nostre imagination, qui aime à se reposer et à se
hater à venir à une fin dans les sous-divisions et analyses: il n'en
est pas ainsi dans la nature qui vient de l'infini et va à l'infini.']
[Footnote 2: Spinoza, _Ethica,_ i. 36, App. '_Quoniam ea nobis prae
ceteris grata sunt quae facile imaginari possumus, ideo homines ordinem
confusioni praeferunt; quasi ordo aliquid in natura praeter respectum
ad nostram imaginationem esset... Videmus itaque omnes rationes quibus
vulgus solet naturam explicare modos esse tantummodo imaginandi._' Cf.
_Eth._ iv. praef.: Epist. xxxii.]
[Footnote 3: 'This transition of thought from the Cause to the Effect
proceeds not from Reason. It derives its origin altogether from
Custom and Experience.' Hume, Essay V. (Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding.) 'All inferences from Experience therefore are effects
of Custom.' (Ibid.)]
[Footnote 4: J. Grote, _Exploratio Philosophica._]
[Footnote 5: Cf. vol. ii. p. 4.]
[Footnote 6: _Philosophie der Religion,_ i. p. 97: 'Die ganze
Philosophie ist nichts Anderes als das Studium der Bestimmungen der
Einheit.' See especially _Encycl._ § 573 (Philosophy of Mind, pp. 192
seqq.).]