Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887: Volume 1, Number 2
Philosophy
Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887: Volume 1, Number 2
Medicine -- Periodicals; Phrenology -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
How and whence is this to come? It will come by the complete
emancipation of the American mind from the thraldom of the false
philosophies, the false theologies, and the debasingly narrow
conceptions of science which have been transplanted into American
colleges. When the strong American intellect shall realize that in the
science of man and in the cultivation of psychometry there is more of
enlightenment, of wisdom, and of actual knowledge than in all that
colleges cherish to-day, we shall have such a flood of original
thought and immensely valuable knowledge as would seem impossible to
the literati who now have the public ear.
Even the narrowest dogmatists of science are beginning to have a
glimpse of the nobler knowledge of the future. Prof. Huxley, the most
dogmatic of British sceptics, has recently said:
"The growth of science, not merely of physical science, but of all
science, means the demonstration of order and natural causation among
phenomena which had not previously been brought under those
conceptions. Nobody who is acquainted with the progress of scientific
thinking in every department of human knowledge, in the course of the
last two centuries, will be disposed to deny that immense provinces
have been added to the realm of science, or to doubt that the next two
centuries will be witnesses of a vastly greater annexation. More
particularly in the region of the physiology of the nervous system is
it justifiable to conclude from the progress that has been made in
analyzing the relations between material and psychical phenomena that
vast further advances will be made, and that sooner or later all the
so-called spontaneous operations of the mind will have, not only their
relations to one another, but their relations to physical phenomena,
connected in natural series of causes and effects, strictly defined.
In other words, while at present we know only the nearer moiety of the
chain of causes and effects by which the phenomena we call material
give rise to those which we call mental, hereafter we shall get to the
further end of the series."
The "further end of the series," however, is vastly different from
anything within the mental range of the distinguished professor, whose
ultra materialism led him to revamp the old Cartesian doctrine that
animals were only machines, like clocks or mills, running
automatically, and destitute of sensation, and intelligence.
The science and philosophy of the future will be distinguished by
their mastery of the realm of mind, and the closer approximation of
the human to the Divine, not only in intelligence, but in ethics.
The JOURNAL OF MAN, as the first periodical organ of the new
philosophy, will attempt gradually to initiate the archetypal forms of
thought of the coming period, in which the disappearance of old
philosophy and ethics shall leave room for growth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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