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
These facts, that science and ordinary knowledge are allied in
nature, and that the one is but a perfected and extended form of the
other, must necessarily underlie the whole theory of science, its
progress, and the relations of its parts to each other. There must be
incompleteness in any history of the sciences, which, leaving out of
view the first steps of their genesis, commences with them only when
they assume definite forms. There must be grave defects, if not a
general untruth, in a philosophy of the sciences considered in their
interdependence and development, which neglects the inquiry how they
came to be distinct sciences, and how they were severally evolved
out of the chaos of primitive ideas. Not only a direct consideration
of the matter, but all analogy, goes to show that in the earlier and
simpler stages must be sought the key to all subsequent intricacies.
The time was when the anatomy and physiology of the human being were
studied {9} by themselves—when the adult man was analyzed and the
relations of parts and of functions investigated, without reference
either to the relations exhibited in the embryo or to the homologous
relations existing in other creatures. Now, however, it has become
manifest that no true conceptions are possible under such conditions.
Anatomists and physiologists find that the real natures of organs and
tissues can be ascertained only by tracing their early evolution; and
that the affinities between existing genera can be satisfactorily made
out only by examining the fossil genera to which they are akin. Well,
is it not clear that the like must be true concerning all things that
undergo development? Is not science a growth? Has not science, too,
its embryology? And must not the neglect of its embryology lead to a
misunderstanding of the principles of its evolution and of its existing
organization?
There are _à priori_ reasons, therefore, for doubting the truth of all
philosophies of the sciences which tacitly proceed upon the common
notion that scientific knowledge and ordinary knowledge are separate;
instead of commencing, as they should, by affiliating the one upon the
other, and showing how it gradually came to be distinguishable from
the other. We may expect to find their generalizations essentially
artificial; and we shall not be deceived. Some illustrations of this
may here be fitly introduced, by way of preliminary to a brief sketch
of the genesis of science from the point of view indicated. And we
cannot more readily find such illustrations than by glancing at a few
of the various _classifications_ of the sciences that have from time to
time been proposed. To consider all of them would take too much space:
we must content ourselves with some of the latest.
* * * * *
Commencing with those which may be soonest disposed of, let us notice,
first, the arrangement propounded by Oken. An abstract of it runs thus:―
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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