The “limits of concepts in natural sciences” then are the same as the
limits of *intellectual* concepts in general. For intellectual, *i.e.*
logical, “values” are the only centres of interest that can lay claim
to universality. There are indeed other groups of important concepts,
the ethical ones, but they are outside intellectuality and may enter
philosophy only as problems, not as solutions. Therefore, history in
its true sense, even if related to the ethical group of concepts,
has no bearing on philosophy. Philosophically it remains a sum of
contingencies, in which certain laws of cumulation and certain series of
cumulation may be discovered. But these series and these laws, if taken
scientifically, only offer us instances of psychological elementalities.
They also might be instances of primary ethical states and relations, if
there were such relations of more than a mere subjective and personal
validity, which at present at least seems not to be the case.
CONCLUSIONS ABOUT SYSTEMATICS AND HISTORY IN GENERAL
We have finished our analysis of the history of mankind as the only
instance of an historical biological process that is actually known to
exist and is not only assumed hypothetically.
What we have learnt from this analysis, though certainly important in
itself, has not afforded us any new result for theoretical biology.
The history of mankind is proved to be of philosophical importance,
at present, so far only as it offers instances to the science of
psychology; besides that it may be of value and importance to many
conditions of practical and emotional life.
There is only one science, and only one kind of logic too. “In one sense
the only science”--that was the predicate attached to natural sciences
by Lord Gifford, as you will remember from our first lecture. It is not
without interest to note that at the end of our course of this year,
we find occasion to realise on what a deep insight into logical and
philosophical relations that sentence was grounded.
We now leave the theory of human history, which has been to us nothing
more than a branch of biological phylogeny in general. We have dealt
with it from quite a simple realistic point of view, not burdened by any
epistemology. We have taken psychical states as realities, just as we
have taken as realities all parts of the animal body; and it seems to
me that we were entitled to do so, as it was only history *about* the
actions of men we were dealing with, not their actions themselves. Next
summer we shall begin with studying action as action, and then, in fact,
a well-founded epistemology will be among our first requirements. And
history also will come on the scene once more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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