The backwardness of social knowledge is marked in its division into
independent and insulated branches of learning. Anthropology, history,
sociology, morals, economics, political science, go their own ways
without constant and systematized fruitful interaction. Only in
appearance is there a similar division in physical knowledge. There is
continuous cross-fertilization between astronomy, physics, chemistry
and the biological sciences. Discoveries and improved methods are so
recorded and organized that constant exchange and intercommunication
take place. The isolation of the humane subjects from one another is
connected with their aloofness from physical knowledge. The mind still
draws a sharp separation between the world in which man lives and the
life of man in and by that world, a cleft reflected in the separation
of man himself into a body and a mind, which, it is currently supposed,
can be known and dealt with apart. That for the past three centuries
energy should have gone chiefly into physical inquiry, beginning
with the things most remote from man such as heavenly bodies, was
to have been expected. The history of the physical sciences reveals
a certain order in which they developed. Mathematical tools had to
be employed before a new astronomy could be constructed. Physics
advanced when ideas worked out in connection with the solar system
were used to describe happenings on the earth. Chemistry waited on
the advance of physics; the sciences of living things required the
material and methods of physics and chemistry in order to make headway.
Human psychology ceased to be chiefly speculative opinion only when
biological and physiological conclusions were available. All this is
natural and seemingly inevitable. Things which had the most outlying
and indirect connection with human interests had to be mastered in some
degree before inquiries could competently converge upon man himself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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