The Philosophy of Evolution: Together With a Preliminary Essay on The Metaphysical Basis of ScienceCarpenter, Stephen H. (Stephen Haskins)
Religion
The Philosophy of Evolution: Together With a Preliminary Essay on The Metaphysical Basis of Science
Carpenter, Stephen H. (Stephen Haskins)
Evolution; Science
both are essential to every true science, and physics, which stops with
physics, leads man by dazzling promises into some Utopian desert only to
leave him there to die of hunger. And it is no less true that
metaphysics, without this basis in experimental science, is illusory
and untrustworthy, wherever the original data are necessarily empirical.
Two conditions are thus necessary to all science: a body of knowable
truth capable of being systematized; and an intelligence capable of
apprehending and systematizing it. One of these conditions is physical
and one is metaphysical; and all true science must be the resultant of
Law and Idea, the Objective and the Subjective, the twin forces of
Nature and Man. If either of these conditions be wanting, there can be
no true science, for science can neither be "evolved from the depths of
the personal consciousness," nor can the scattered letters of scientific
truth, as given in nature, arrange themselves into the words of a
significant message. Knowledge must be classified before it is science,
and that which classifies can only be intellect--discovering and
enunciating this classification according to the laws of mental action.
As prominence is given to one or other of these two conditions we have
the division into Logical and Natural, but the fundamental principle of
classification is the same in both--it being simply the law of
intellectual action--just as the law which governs the action of the
levers of a loom will determine the pattern of the woven fabric. There
can, therefore, be no conflict between the methods of Logic and those of
Nature. The determining element in all classification, whether of the
phenomena of Mind or of the grosser phenomena of Matter is uniformly and
always the same--the law of intellectual action.
Science then resolves itself into a determination of this Law of mental
activity, so that in an ultimate analysis, all science is metaphysical,
just as all science primarily is physical. Here, as elsewhere, Law can
be studied only in its objective manifestations. The Law of Thinking can
be educed only from expressed Thought, but the Law is not objective
thought, any more than the idea of the sculptor is marble, or the
conception of the painter is paint. The simplest expression of thought
is not the syllogism but the logical proposition. Now, it is plain that
if the proposition is the formulation--the material representative of
thought--if we study it as we study other natural symbols, we will find
in it the fundamental Law of Thinking, and ultimately the fundamental
Law of all Science: just as, if it were possible to reduce all
elementary substances to one, the chemist would be able to find in that
one a condensed expression of chemical science.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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