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
That nature, as known and knowable by man, is a great artist, and that
man's æsthetical consciousness may be trusted as having a certain
ontological value, is the postulate properly derived from the
considerations advanced in the latest, and in some respects the most
satisfactory, of the three Critiques of Kant. The ideal way of looking
at natural phenomena which so delighted the mind of Goethe has now been
placed on broad and sound foundations by the fruitful industries of many
workmen,--such as Karl Ernst von Baer and Charles Darwin,--whose
morphological and evolutionary conceptions of the universe have
transformed the current conceptions of cosmic processes. But the world
of physical and natural phenomena has thereby been rendered not less,
but more, of a Cosmos, an orderly totality.
In addition to these more general but somewhat vague evaluations of the
progress of philosophy during the nineteenth century, we are certainly
called upon to face the question whether, after all, any advance has
been made toward the more satisfactory solution of the definite problems
which the Kantian criticism left unsolved. To this question I believe an
affirmative answer may be given in accordance with the facts of history.
It will be remembered that the first of these problems was the
epistemological. Certainly no little improvement has been made in the
psychology of cognition. We can no longer repeat the mistakes of Kant,
either with respect to the uncritical assumptions he makes regarding the
origin of knowledge in the so-called "faculties" of the human mind or
regarding the analysis of those faculties and their interdependent
relations. It is not the Scottish philosophy alone which has led to the
conclusion that, in the word of the late Professor Adamson, "What are
called acts or states of consciousness are _not_ rightly conceived of as
having for their objects their own modes of existence as ways in which a
subject is modified." And in the larger manner both science and
philosophy, in their negations and their affirmations, and even in their
points of view, have better grounds for the faith of human reason in its
power progressively to master the knowledge of Reality than was the case
a hundred years ago. Nor has the skepticism of the same era, whether by
shallow scoffing at repeated failures, or by pious sighs over the
limitations of human reason, or by critical analysis of the cognitive
faculties "according to well-established principles," succeeded in
limiting our speculative pretensions to the sphere of possible
experience,--in the Kantian meaning both of "principles" and of
"experience." But what both science and philosophy are compelled to
agree upon as a common underlying principle is this: The proof of the
most fundamental presuppositions, as well as of the latest more
scientifically established conclusions, of both science and philosophy,
is the assistance they afford in the satisfactory explanation of the
totality of racial experience.
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