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
So that the spring out of which our world is to arise may be described
as either the _idea informed with purposive energy_, or _purpose or will
informed and guided by the idea_. It makes no difference which form of
conception we use. In either case if we include feeling as interest we
are able to conceive movements originating in some species of
apprehension, taking the dynamic form of purpose, and motived and
selected, so to speak, by interest; and in describing such activity we
are simply describing these normal movements of consciousness with which
our experience makes us most familiar. (3) The third question of method
involves the relation or correlation of the metaphysical interpretation
with that of the natural or physical science. Two points are fundamental
here. In the first place, it must be borne in mind that it is the same
world with which the plain man, the man of science, and the
metaphysician are concerned. We cannot partition off the external world
to the plain man, the atoms and ethers to the man of science, leaving
the metaphysician in exclusive and solitary possession of the world of
consciousness. It is the same world for all. The metaphysician cannot
shift the physical world, with its oceans and icebergs, its vast
planetary systems and milky ways, on to the shoulders of the physicist.
This is the metaphysician's own recalcitrant world, which will doubtless
task all his resources to explain. In the _second_ place, though it is
the same world that is clamoring for interpretation, it is a world that
passes through successive transformations, in order to adapt itself to
progressive modes of interpretation. The plain man is called to pass
through a species of Copernican revolution that subordinates the
phenomenon to its ground, before he can become a man of science. In
turn, the man of science must go through the Copernican process, and
learn to subordinate his atoms and ethers to consciousness before he can
become a metaphysician. And it is this transformation that marks one of
the most fundamental steps in the method of metaphysics. The world must
experience this transformation, and it must become habitual to the
thinker to subordinate the physical to the mental before the
metaphysical point of view can be other than foreign to him. If, then,
it be the same content with which the sciences and metaphysics are
called on to deal, it is clear that we have on our hands another problem
on the answer to which the fate of metaphysics vitally depends; the
question of the _correlation_ of its method with that of the sciences so
that it may stand vindicated as the final interpretation of things.
III
QUESTION OF THE CORRELATION OF METAPHYSICS WITH THE SCIENCES
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