Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 2 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy
Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 2 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.
Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy; Political science; Science
The broadest natural division among the Sciences, is the division
between those which deal with the abstract relations {77} under which
phenomena are presented to us, and those which deal with the phenomena
themselves. Relations of whatever orders, are nearer akin to one
another than they are to any objects. Objects of whatever orders, are
nearer akin to one another than they are to any relations. Whether,
as some hold, Space and Time are nothing but forms of Thought[2];
or whether, as I hold myself, they are forms of Things, that have
generated forms of Thought through organized and inherited experience
of Things; it is equally true that Space and Time are contrasted
absolutely with the existences disclosed to us in Space and Time; and
hence the Sciences which deal exclusively with Space and Time, are
separated by the profoundest of all distinctions from the Sciences
which deal with the existences contained in Space and Time. Space is
the abstract of all relations of co-existence. Time is the abstract
of all relations of sequence. And dealing as they do entirely with
relations of co-existence and sequence, in their general or special
forms, Logic and Mathematics form a class of the Sciences more widely
unlike the rest, than any of the rest are from one another.
The Sciences which deal with existences themselves, instead of the
blank forms in which existences are presented to us, admit of a
sub-division less profound than the division above made, but more
profound than any of the divisions among the Sciences individually
considered. They {78} fall into two classes, having quite different
aspects, aims, and methods. Every phenomenon is more or less
composite—is a manifestation of force under several distinct modes.
Hence result two objects of inquiry. We may study the component
modes of force separately; or we may study them as co-operating to
generate in this composite phenomenon. On the one hand, neglecting
all the incidents of particular cases, we may aim to educe the laws
of each mode of force, when it is uninterfered with. On the other
hand, the incidents of the particular case being given, we may seek to
interpret the entire phenomenon, as a product of the several forces
simultaneously in action. The truths reached through the first kind
of inquiry, though concrete inasmuch as they have actual existences
for their subject-matters, are abstract inasmuch as they refer to the
modes of existence apart from one another; while the truths reached
by the second kind of inquiry are properly concrete, inasmuch as they
formulate the facts in their combined order, as they occur in Nature.
The Sciences, then, in their main divisions, stand thus:―
SCIENCE is
that which treats of the forms
in which phenomona are known to us; ABSTRACT SCIENCE
(Logic and Mathematics)
that which treats of the phenomena themselves
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