Where is the moral progress that corresponds to our economic
accomplishments? The latter is the direct fruit of the revolution that
has been wrought in physical science. But where is there a corresponding
human science and art? Not only has the improvement in the method of
knowing remained so far mainly limited to technical and economic
matters, but this progress has brought with it serious new moral
disturbances. I need only cite the late war, the problem of capital and
labor, the relation of economic classes, the fact that while the new
science has achieved wonders in medicine and surgery, it has also
produced and spread occasions for diseases and weaknesses. These
considerations indicate to us how undeveloped are our politics, how
crude and primitive our education, how passive and inert our morals.
The causes remain which brought philosophy into existence as an attempt
to find an intelligent substitute for blind custom and blind impulse as
guides to life and conduct. The attempt has not been successfully
accomplished. Is there not reason for believing that the release of
philosophy from its burden of sterile metaphysics and sterile
epistemology instead of depriving philosophy of problems and
subject-matter would open a way to questions of the most perplexing and
the most significant sort?
Let me specify one problem quite directly suggested by certain points in
this lecture. It has been pointed out that the really fruitful
application of the contemplative idea was not in science but in the
esthetic field. It is difficult to imagine any high development of the
fine arts except where there is curious and loving interest in forms and
motions of the world quite irrespective of any use to which they may be
put. And it is not too much to say that every people that has attained a
high esthetic development has been a people in which the contemplative
attitude has flourished--as the Greek, the Hindoo, the medieval
Christian. On the other hand, the scientific attitude that has actually
proved itself in scientific progress is, as has been pointed out, a
practical attitude. It takes forms as disguises for hidden processes.
Its interest in change is in what it leads to, what can be done with it,
to what use it can be put. While it has brought nature under control,
there is something hard and aggressive in its attitude toward nature
unfavorable to the esthetic enjoyment of the world. Surely there is no
more significant question before the world than this question of the
possibility and method of reconciliation of the attitudes of practical
science and contemplative esthetic appreciation. Without the former, man
will be the sport and victim of natural forces which he cannot use or
control. Without the latter, mankind might become a race of economic
monsters, restlessly driving hard bargains with nature and with one
another, bored with leisure or capable of putting it to use only in
ostentatious display and extravagant dissipation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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