International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
But both inside and outside of the Universities and Academies the
scientific spirit and acquisitions of the nineteenth century have most
profoundly, and on the whole favorably, affected the development of its
philosophy. In the wider meaning of the word, "science,"--the meaning,
namely, in which science = _Wissenschaft_,--philosophy aims to be
scientific; and science can never be indifferent to philosophy. In their
common aim at a rational and unitary system of principles, which shall
explain and give its due significance to the totality of human
experience, science and philosophy can never remain long in antagonism;
they ought never even temporarily to be divided in interests, or in the
spirit which leads each generously to recognize the importance of the
other. The early part of the last century was, indeed, too much under
the influence of that almost exclusively speculative _Natur-philosophie_,
of which Schelling and Hegel were the most prominent exponents. On the
other hand, the conception of nature as a vast interconnected and
unitary system of a rational order, unfolding itself in accordance with
teleological principles,--however manifold and obscure,--is a noble
conception and not destined to pass away.
On the continent--at least in France, where it had attained its highest
development--the scientific spirit was, at the close of the eighteenth
century, on the whole opposed to systematization. The impulse to both
science and philosophy during both the eighteenth and the nineteenth
centuries, over the entire continent of Europe, was chiefly due to the
epoch-making work of that greatest of all titles in the modern
scientific development of the Western World, the _Principia_ of Newton.
In mathematics and the physical sciences, during the early third or half
of the last century, Great Britain also has a roll of distinguished
names which compares most favorably with that of either France or
Germany. But in England, France, and the United States, during the whole
century, science has lacked the breadth and philosophic spirit which it
had in Germany during the first three quarters of this period. During
all that time the German man of science was, as a rule, a scholar, an
investigator, a teacher, _and a philosopher_. Science and philosophy
thrived better, however, in Scotland than elsewhere outside of Germany,
so far as their relations in interdependence were concerned. Into the
Scottish universities Playfair introduced some of the continental
suggestions toward the end of the eighteenth century, so that there was
less of exclusiveness and unfriendly rivalry between science and
philosophy; and both profited thereby. In the United States, during the
first half or more of the century, so dominant were the theological and
practical interests and influences that there was little free
development of either science or philosophy,--if we interpret the one as
the equivalent of _Wissenschaft_ and understand the other in the
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