When a geometer wishes to understand the form of a curve, he first
resolves it into small rectilinear elements. In doing this, however, he
is fully aware that these elements are only provisional and arbitrary
devices for comprehending in parts what he cannot comprehend as a whole.
When the law of the curve is found he no longer thinks of the elements.
Similarly, it would not become physical science to see in its
self-created, changeable, economical tools, molecules and atoms,
realities behind phenomena, forgetful of the lately acquired sapience of
her older sister, philosophy, in substituting a mechanical mythology for
the old animistic or metaphysical scheme, and thus creating no end of
suppositious problems. The atom must remain a tool for representing
phenomena, like the functions of mathematics. Gradually, however, as the
intellect, by contact with its subject-matter, grows in discipline,
physical science will give up its mosaic play with stones and will seek
out the boundaries and forms of the bed in which the living stream of
phenomena flows. The goal which it has set itself is the _simplest_ and
_most economical_ abstract expression of facts.
* * * * *
The question now remains, whether the same method of research which till
now we have tacitly restricted to physics, is also applicable in the
psychical domain. This question will appear superfluous to the physical
inquirer. Our physical and psychical views spring in exactly the same
manner from instinctive knowledge. We read the thoughts of men in their
acts and facial expressions without knowing how. Just as we predict the
behavior of a magnetic needle placed near a current by imagining
Ampère's swimmer in the current, similarly we predict in thought the
acts and behavior of men by assuming sensations, feelings, and wills
similar to our own connected with their bodies. What we here
instinctively perform would appear to us as one of the subtlest
achievements of science, far outstripping in significance and ingenuity
Ampère's rule of the swimmer, were it not that every child unconsciously
accomplished it. The question simply is, therefore, to grasp
scientifically, that is, by conceptional thought, what we are already
familiar with from other sources. And here much is to be accomplished. A
long sequence of facts is to be disclosed between the physics of
expression and movement and feeling and thought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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