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
interest in law, which are always easily traced among the sciences, even
the sciences in the opposite camps of matter and mind, of any particular
time. Atomism in physics is contemporary with atomism in psychology and
with individualism in political philosophy; a monarchical politics with
an anthropomorphic, creationalistic theology and an also monarchical
physically centred astronomy, whether heliocentric or geocentric; and a
Newtonian astronomy, which really makes a law or force instead of an
individual body the centre and control of the solar system, with
democracy or constitutionalism, and with inductive instead of deductive
logic and naturalistic instead of dogmatic theology; so that at no time,
whatever the scientist's special interest, whatever his [p.098] special
syllable, can he fail to have at least a formal sympathy with others.
Such analogies among the sciences, so often recognized and so
absorbingly interesting to the students of the history of thought, if
not exactly doors in the panelling, may be said to make the panelled
partitions at least translucent if not unsubstantial and transparent.
But the most important fact in illustration of our case against
specialism is yet to be considered, and unfortunately it takes us where
to some the waters may seem dangerously deep. Not only for reasons
already given and emphasized is the special science a misnomer, a
contradiction in terms, except in so far as specialism be taken merely
as an incident, not without its humour, of scientific method, but also
for the same reasons (and chiefly because the truth and reality of the
universe are bound to be conserved) every special science must sooner or
later develop its doctrines either into direct paradoxes or into tenets
that oppose and contradict each other. Thus, as has been shown,
specialism in science is itself a paradox, and, as now asserted, every
special science assuming precise form and real validity becomes a home
of paradoxical or contradictory doctrines. Indeed, these doctrines just
through their opposition appear be the most effective agents of that
compensation for neglected points of view, or conservation of all points
of view, which we are insisting is for ever forced upon the scientific
specialist. In the cases of physical epistemology and epistemological
physics we have already seen doctrines working to this end. In those
cases the real treachery to the avowed [p.099] standpoints lay in
virtual when not open contradiction. And, for the general principles, is
it not quite clear that nothing so surely as contradiction in any given
point of view, or in the specific doctrines developed under it, can
serve the interests of any other points of view? I have heard it said,
but by whom originally I do not know, that a paradox or contradiction
was only the mind on tiptoe struggling to look over a very high wall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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