First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of LifeWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Conduct of life
We must make use of terms and sometimes of provisional terms. But
we must guard against such terms and the mental danger of excessive
intension they carry with them. The child takes a stick and says it is
a sword and does not forget, he takes a shadow under the bed and says it
is a bear and he half forgets. The man takes a set of emotions and says
it is a God, and he gets excited and propagandist and does forget; he is
involved in disputes and confusions with the old gods of wood and stone,
and presently he is making his God a Great White Throne and fitting him
up with a mystical family.
Essentially we have to train our minds to think anew, if we are to think
beyond the purposes for which the mind seems to have been evolved. We
have to disabuse ourselves from the superstition of the binding nature
of definitions and the exactness of logic. We have to cure ourselves of
the natural tricks of common thought and argument. You know the way
of it, how effective and foolish it is; the quotation of the exact
statement of which every jot and tittle must be maintained, the
challenge to be consistent, the deadlock between your terms and mine.
More and more as I grow older and more settled in my views am I bored by
common argument, bored not because I am ceasing to be interested in
the things argued about, but because I see more and more clearly the
futility of the methods pursued.
How then are we to think and argue and what truth may we attain? Is not
the method of the scientific investigator a valid one, and is there not
truth to the world of fact in scientific laws? Decidedly there is. And
the continual revision and testing against fact that these laws get
is constantly approximating them more and more nearly to a trustworthy
statement of fact. Nevertheless they are never true in that dogmatic
degree in which they seem true to the unphilosophical student of
science. Accepting as I do the validity of nearly all the general
propositions of modern science, I have constantly to bear in mind that
about them too clings the error of excessive claims to precision.
The man trained solely in science falls easily into a superstitious
attitude; he is overdone with classification. He believes in the
possibility of exact knowledge everywhere. What is not exact he declares
is not knowledge. He believes in specialists and experts in all fields.
I dispute this universal range of possible scientific precision. There
is, I allege, a not too clearly recognised order in the sciences which
forms the gist of my case against this scientific pretension. There is
a gradation in the importance of the individual instance as one passes
from mechanics and physics and chemistry through the biological
sciences to economics and sociology, a gradation whose correlations and
implications have not yet received adequate recognition, and which does
profoundly affect the method of study and research in each science.
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