The will to doubt : $b An essay in philosophy for the general thinkerLloyd, Alfred H. (Alfred Henry)
Philosophy
The will to doubt : $b An essay in philosophy for the general thinker
Lloyd, Alfred H. (Alfred Henry)
Belief and doubt; Philosophy -- Introductions
Yet here, before discussing further the relation of dualism to science,
it is well to observe that the positive history of science justifies the
account of its rise which has now been given. The age of science among
the Greeks was coincident with the closing conflict between Greek
civilization and the general life [p.065] of the Mediterranean, and the
age of modern science began, not to attempt a long story, with the
discovery of America. All "looking before leaping" is transitional or
revolutionary, and while, of course, there had been transitions and
degrees of scientific inquiry before, the science of the Greeks belongs
to that very critical transition from Greece to Rome; and modern
science, to the transition, certainly not less critical, from
Christendom to--who can say to what? But not only does history show
science to arise when there is a stream to cross; also it shows the life
of the time, in the first place, to be sharply disintegrated, its
different factors being separately and abstractly expressed through as
many different social groups, and, in the second place, in each of the
groups to be given to double living, to the storm and stress of being
one thing and seeming another. Always an age, conspicuously and
characteristically scientific, has been an age of clearly developed
classes and of a general duplicity in living.
Thus, to give a striking, although possibly too philosophical an
illustration of the duplicity, Democritus, the great materialist and
atomist, and Plato, the great idealist, were contemporaries and equally
were creatures of their day and generation, and their century was the
century of great achievements in Greek science. Moreover, as regards the
coincident organization of society, we know at least of Plato that he
was keenly conscious of the divisions of society into distinct classes.
And in very much the same way materialism and idealism, not to mention
hedonism and rigorism, or naturalism and supernaturalism, [p.066] have
been inseparately associated with the rise and the successes of modern
science. These philosophies, it must be remembered, are always more than
so many conflicting "isms." They are, too, more than the special
conceits, in theory or in practice, of so many separate social classes
or of the great leaders of these classes. In their very differences they
are the definite, the "public" expression of a conflict, or division,
that inwardly affects every individual member, whatever his class or
profession, which the society contains. In the day and generation of
Democritus and Plato were there not well-defined parties, manifest in
all the different and separately organized phases of life--moral,
industrial, political or religious, namely, the parties of the
conservatives and the radicals? And were there not also, as typical
individual characters, each of them revealing to everybody something
present within his own life, the only conventional loyalist and the more
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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