Sixthly, the cultivated modern man is still largely arrested and stunted
by the spell of Descartes, with his insistence upon immediate unity of
outlook and perfect clearness of idea as the sole, universal tests,
indeed constituents, of truth. 'I judged that I could take for my
general rule that the things which we conceive very clearly and very
distinctly are all true'--these and these alone.[37] Thus thenceforth
Mathematics and Mechanics have generally been held to be the only full
and typical sciences, and human knowledge to be co-extensive with such
sciences alone. Yet Biology and Psychology now rightly claim to be
sciences, each with its own special methods and tests distinct from
those of Mathematics and Mechanics. Indeed, the wisest and most fruitful
philosophy is now coming to see that 'Reality generally eludes our
thought, when thought is reduced to mathematical formulas'.[38] Concrete
thought, contrariwise, finds full room also for History, Philosophy,
Religion, for each as furnishing rich subject-matters for Knowledge or
Science, of a special but true kind.
Seventhly. Already Mathematics and Mechanics absolutely depend, for the
success of their applications to actual Nature, upon a spontaneous
correspondence between the human reason and the Rationality of Nature.
The immensity of this success is an unanswerable proof that this
rationality is not imposed, but found there, by man. But Thought without
a Thinker is an absurd proposition. Thus faith in Science is faith in
God. Perhaps the most impressive declaration of this necessary connexion
between Knowledge and Theism stands at the end of that great work,
Christoph Sigwart's _Logik_. 'As soon as we raise the question as to the
real _right_', the adequate reason, 'of our demands for a
correspondence, within our several sciences, between the principles and
the objects of the researches special to each, there emerges the need
for the Last and Unconditional Reason. And the actual situation is not
that this Reason appears only on the horizon of our finite knowledge,'
as Kant would have it. 'Not in thus merely extending our knowledge lies
the significance of the situation, but in the fact that this
Unconditional Reason constitutes the presupposition without which no
desire for Knowledge (in the proper and strict sense of the word) is
truly thinkable.'[39]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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