No one can doubt that function logically precedes structure; or if any one
does doubt this, he need only observe his own experience and see how in
every new acquisition of knowledge or of power there come, first, the
thought, the idea, then the effort, next the habit, and finally the
modification of cerebral mechanism, in which the effort and the habit become
represented in relatively permanent and static form. In fact, the crux of
the whole discussion between science and metaphysics turns on, or harks back
to the discussion between function and structure; and it is the latter, in
the sense in which I mean the word, that has had of late a too large share
of our attention.
The enterprise on which we are all of us embarked,--whether we define it as
an investigation, pure and simple, into human nature and human motives, or
as a therapeutic attempt to relieve invalids of their symptoms,--is a larger
one than it is commonly conceived of as being. Each physician and each
investigator has, indeed, the right to say that for practical reasons he
prefers to confine his attention to some single portion of one or the other
of these tasks, be it never so small. But each one should regard himself as
virtually under an obligation to recognize the respects in which this chosen
task is incomplete. Every physicist is aware that there is some form of
energy underlying, or rather expressing itself in, light and heat and
gravitation. Physicists do not study this form of energy, not because they
do not wish to but simply because they cannot do so by the only methods that
they are allowed to use. But, as a reaction of defense, they sometimes
assert that no one else can do so either, that this underlying energy cannot
be explained. To say this is, however, in my judgment, to misappreciate
what an explanation is.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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