Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Enough has now been said to show the basis on which rests the whole
superstructure, of man's mental attitude toward the cosmos. Despite
all uncertainties regarding the details of the process, we may be
assured of its fundamental nature, and are thus compelled to recognize
the dependence of the forms of man's mental attitude toward the
universe upon his knowledge of himself. It is because his own actions
have their source in a personal will that he refers external movements
to will. He is conscious of his own acts, and the world around him can
not be devoid of a like illumination. Does he himself plan? Nature
must also be intelligent. And the highest qualities which he can
discover in himself he reads unhesitatingly into the cosmos.
At first sight, then, knowledge may seem inextricably involved in the
process here described. If man can not know the external system to
which he must adapt himself save by assimilating it to himself--save
by interpreting it on the basis of analogies which he discovers
between his own body and its activities, and the world with its
activities--are we not committed by our very nature as organisms to
all the errors which that nature imposes upon us? If, in other words,
every effort to view the universe as it is, independently of us, be
rendered impossible by the very nature of the knowing process, with
what chance of success shall we seek to eliminate those vitalistic and
psychomorphic characters which seem to belong to that process as its
very warp and woof? In reality our knowledge inflicts upon us no such
dilemma. Man is the helpless "measure of the universe" only to the
extent that his reasoning processes are undeveloped. That knowledge
must always have a subjective element is undoubted, but that man must
always mistake the subjective vesture with which things are clothed by
the senses for the things themselves is an inference which the whole
history of thought negatives. While his life remained simple,
primitive man could regard appearances as realities without
prejudicing the overplus of utility brought to him by his knowledge.
Yet as his relation to the natural surroundings grew in complexity,
the importance of the reasoning process, with its veto power over the
deliverances of the senses, began to assert itself. At first accepted
with little or no demur, these deliverances came more and more to be
challenged in the interest of self-maintenance; and finally, by
expansion of a germ possessed by the mind in the beginning, there was
developed that way of dealing with the testimony of appearances which
we call the objective method. The evidence previously accepted had
been, though on the whole useful, in large measure misleading. For in
appearances men saw and felt mainly what Nature was for them, and only
to a minor degree what the external world was for and in itself. The
great need of the investigator of Nature is to know what things are
independently of man, in order to know how they act on one another, as
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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