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
And what is the difficulty? Once more the difficulty is in the
assumption, so natural to an objective science, of fixed conceptions.
Are purpose and social feeling so fixed in their nature, and above all
so well understood, that their presence or absence can be established by
an experiment or two or ten thousand conducted on strictly objective
principles? No conceptions are fixed, and instead of questions of fact
we should have, what a strictly objective science cannot have, questions
of meaning. Thus, not: Are low organisms, or any organisms, social or
purposive? but: What, if anything, do the processes of their [p.085]
lives testify as to the real nature of society or purpose?
The conservative character of objective science, or the view-point in
its question of fact which the conservatism determines, is the chief
source of the negative attitude of science so familiar to all and so
often an object of complaint. To take, perhaps, the most widely
interesting case, for science to suppose that God either is or is
not--because he must either be or not be the particular thing men have
thought him--is to beg the theological question altogether. Indeed, for
this question of God's existence and for any other question of objective
fact a negative answer is almost, if not quite, a foregone conclusion,
since the very putting of the question is, _ipso facto_, evidence that a
new idea of the thing inquired about--of God, perhaps, or purpose or
society--is at least just below the horizon of man's consciousness, and
so that the old idea has already lost its validity. Nothing ever is
where you seek it, or what you seek in it, for the simple reason that
your conscious seeking has changed it. Why, then, look--perhaps with a
telescope after a God in the skies--for what you should know you cannot
find? Why despair when a question meets a "no" of its own dictation? The
real questioner lives in a living world, in which all things change and
die, yet only for rebirth, while the "objective" questioner simply
cannot see that the negative of his answer can be only relative to what
is already passing.
In so many ways, then, a would-be objective science is open to
criticism, and affords in consequence a cause for doubt. Only
subjectivity can make it fruitfully [p.086] and worthily scientific.
Only a change in the form of its question can make it substantially as
well as formally progressive. Only a tempering of its negative answers
to a merely relative meaning can make it honest. It is looking at what
is not, and in a way which is artificial, and it sees everything only in
the clear light of its own shadow. Surely to be scientific is human; to
be objective is to rival the lover's unselfishness.
II. SCIENCE WOULD BE SPECIALISTIC.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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