It is unnecessary to pursue this conception further. The justification of the concept of vibratory existence must be purely experimental. The point illustrated by this example is that the cosmological outlook, which is here adopted, is perfectly consistent with the demands for discontinuity which have been urged from the side of physics. Also if this concept of temporalisation as a successive realisation of epochal durations be adopted, the difficulty of Zeno is evaded. The particular form, which has been given here to this concept, is purely for that purpose of illustration and must necessarily require recasting before it can be adapted to the results of experimental physics.
CHAPTER IX
SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY
In the present lecture, it is my object to consider some reactions of science upon the stream of philosophic thought during the modern centuries with which we are concerned. I shall make no attempt to compress a history of modern philosophy within the limits of one lecture. We shall merely consider some contacts between science and philosophy, in so far as they lie within the scheme of thought which it is the purpose of these lectures to develop. For this reason the whole of the great German idealistic movement will be ignored, as being out of effective touch with its contemporary science so far as reciprocal modification of concepts is concerned. Kant, from whom this movement took its rise, was saturated with Newtonian physics, and with the ideas of the great French physicists—such as Clairaut,[[11]] for instance—who developed the Newtonian ideas. But the philosophers who developed the Kantian school of thought, or who transformed it into Hegelianism, either lacked Kant’s background of scientific knowledge, or lacked his potentiality of becoming a great physicist if philosophy had not absorbed his main energies.
[11]. Cf. the curious evidence of Kant’s scientific reading in the Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Analytic, Second Analogy of Experience, where he refers to the phenomenon of capillary action. This is an unnecessarily complex illustration; a book resting on a table would have equally well sufficed. But the subject had just been adequately treated for the first time by Clairaut in an appendix to his Figure of the Earth. Kant evidently had read this appendix, and his mind was full of it.
The origin of modern philosophy is analogous to that of science, and is contemporaneous. The general trend of its development was settled in the seventeenth century, partly at the hands of the same men who established the scientific principles. This settlement of purpose followed upon a transitional period dating from the fifteenth century. There was in fact a general movement of European mentality, which carried along with its stream, religion, science and philosophy. It may shortly be characterised as being the direct recurrence to the original sources of Greek inspiration on the part of men whose spiritual shape had been derived from inheritance from the Middle Ages. There was therefore no revival of Greek mentality. Epochs do not rise from the dead. The principles of aesthetics and of reason, which animated the Greek civilisation, were reclothed in a modern mentality. Between the two there lay other religions, other systems of law, other anarchies, and other racial inheritances, dividing the living from the dead.
Philosophy is peculiarly sensitive to such differences. For, whereas you can make a replica of an ancient statue, there is no possible replica of an ancient state of mind. There can be no nearer approximation than that which a masquerade bears to real life. There may be understanding of the past, but there is a difference between the modern and the ancient reactions to the same stimuli.
In the particular case of philosophy, the distinction in tonality lies on the surface. Modern philosophy is tinged with subjectivism, as against the objective attitude of the ancients. The same change is to be seen in religion. In the early history of the Christian[Christian] Church, the theological interest centred in discussions on the nature of God, the meaning of the Incarnation, and apocalyptic forecasts[forecasts] of the ultimate fate of the world. At the Reformation, the Church was torn asunder by dissension as to the individual experiences of believers in respect to justification. The individual subject of experience had been substituted for the total drama of all reality. Luther asked, ‘How am I justified?’; modern philosophers have asked, ‘How do I have knowledge?’ The emphasis lies upon the subject of experience. This change of standpoint is the work of Christianity in its pastoral aspect of shepherding the company of believers. For century after century it insisted upon the infinite worth of the individual human soul. Accordingly, to the instinctive egotism of physical desires, it has superadded an instinctive feeling of justification for an egotism of intellectual outlook. Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance. Without a doubt, this modern direction of attention emphasises truths of the highest value. For example, in the field of practical life, it has abolished slavery, and has impressed upon the popular imagination the primary rights of mankind.
Descartes, in his Discourse on Method, and in his Meditations, discloses with great clearness the general conceptions which have since influenced modern philosophy. There is a subject receiving experience: in the Discourse this subject is always mentioned in the first person, that is to say, as being Descartes himself. Descartes starts with himself as being a mentality, which in virtue of its consciousness of its own inherent presentations of sense and of thought, is thereby conscious of its own existence as a unit entity. The subsequent history of philosophy revolves round the Cartesian formulation of the primary datum. The ancient world takes its stand upon the drama of the Universe, the modern world upon the inward drama of the Soul. Descartes, in his Meditations, expressly grounds the existence of this inward drama upon the possibility of error. There may be no correspondence with objective fact, and thus there must be a soul with activities whose reality is purely derivative from itself. For example, here is a quotation[[12]] from Meditation II: “But it will be said that these presentations are false, and that I am dreaming. Let it be so. At all events it is certain that I seem to see light, hear a noise, and feel heat; this cannot be false, and this is what in me is properly called perceiving (sentire), which is nothing else than thinking. From this I begin to know what I am with somewhat greater clearness and distinctness than heretofore.” Again in Meditation III: “...; for, as I before remarked, although the things which I perceive or imagine are perhaps nothing at all apart from me, I am nevertheless assured that those modes of consciousness which I call perceptions and imaginations, in as far only as they are modes of consciousness, exist in me.”
[12]. Quoted from Veitch’s translation.
The objectivism of the medieval and the ancient worlds passed over into science. Nature is there conceived as for itself, with its own mutual reactions. Under the recent influence of relativity, there has been a tendency towards subjectivist formulations. But, apart from this recent exception, nature, in scientific thought, has had its laws formulated without any reference to dependence on individual observers. There is, however, this difference between the older and the later attitudes towards science. The anti-rationalism of the moderns has checked any attempt to harmonise the ultimate concepts of science with ideas drawn from a more concrete survey of the whole of reality. The material, the space, the time, the various laws concerning the transition of material configurations, are taken as ultimate stubborn facts, not to be tampered with.