The Philosophy of nature, like that of history, expresses itself in false analogies. It will say, for instance, that the poles of the magnet are the opposed moments of the concept, made extrinsic and appearing in space; or that light is the ideality of nature; or that magnetism corresponds to length, electricity to breadth and gravity to volume; or again (like more ancient philosophers), that water, or fire, or sulphur, or mercury, is the essence of all natural facts. But these phenomena which are given as essences, those classes of natural facts which are given as moments of the concept and of the spirit, are no longer either scientific phenomena, or the concepts and spiritual forms of philosophy. The first are intuitions and not categories; the second categories and not intuitions; and just because they are so clearly distinguished from one another they mutually mingle in the a priori synthesis. On the other hand, the concepts of the Philosophy of nature are categories, which as such present themselves in their emptiness as intuitions, and intuitions, which in their blindness present themselves as categories. These thoughts are contradictory. They can be spoken, or rather tittered, because it is possible to combine phonetically contradictory propositions, but it is impossible to think them. Such combinations by their ingenuity often give rise to surprise or astonishment. But mental satisfaction is never obtained from them merely because the mind is excited and deluded. On the other hand, the Philosophy of nature, in this labour of ingenuity, runs against limits, which even ingenuity cannot overcome. Then are heard affirmations, which amount to open confessions of the impossibility of the task. Of this sort is the assertion that nature contains the contingent and the irrational and therefore is incapable of complete rationalization; or that nature in its self-externality is impotent to achieve the concept and the spirit. In like manner. Philosophies of history end by confessing that there are facts which are told and are not deduced, because they are small, contingent and fortuitous matter for chronicle. Thus, after having announced in the programme the rationality of nature and of history, they recognize in the execution of the programme that the contrary is true. They simply deny the rationality of the world, because they cannot bring themselves to deny the rationality of the pseudo-sciences of philosophism.
Works entitled Philosophy of nature.
Finally, the reservations made in the case of works dealing with the Philosophy of history are to be repeated for those dealing with the Philosophy of nature. In them, too, there is something more than, and something different from, the sterile analogical exercises that we have mentioned. Some of the philosophers of nature, in the pursuit of their illusions, have made occasional scientific discoveries, in the same way that the alchemists seeking the philosopher's stone made discoveries in Chemistry. Those discoveries in physical and natural science cannot serve to increase the value of the theory of the Philosophy of nature any more than those made in chemistry increased the value of alchemy. But they confer value on the books entitled Philosophy of nature, and do honour to their authors as physicists, not as metaphysicians. From the philosophical point of view, those works have had the merit of affirming, though but in imaginative and symbolical ways, the unity and spirituality of nature, opening the path to its unification with the history of man. They have the yet greater merit of contributing effectively in the battle engaged by them against the sciences of making clear the empirical character of the naturalistic concepts and the abstract character of the mathematical. Nevertheless, they drew illegitimate conclusions from such gnoseological truth and carried on a war of conquest, which must be held to be unjust. In virtue of the positive elements that they contain, works on the Philosophy of nature have aided the advance both of the sciences and of philosophy, which in their properly philosophico-naturalistic parts they have violated and debased and forced into hybrid unions.
Contemporary demands for a Philosophy of nature and their various meanings.
In our day demands for a Philosophy of history are rare and received with scant favour; but it seems that those for a Philosophy of nature are again acquiring vigour. On seeking the inward meaning of this fact, it is seen that on the one hand many of those who demand a Philosophy of nature are empiricists, desirous of a natural science elaborated into a philosophy, and therefore not properly of a Philosophy of nature, but of a view of the natural sciences that may supplant philosophy. Other upholders of a Philosophy of nature echo the only programme of such a philosophy, as it was formulated especially by Schelling and by Hegel, but declare themselves altogether dissatisfied with the attempts to carry it out made by Schelling, by Hegel and by the followers of both. They are dissatisfied, but incapable of setting their dissatisfaction at rest by a new attempt at carrying out the programme. They are also without the intellectual courage necessary to question and to re—examine the solidity of the programme itself, which is in their judgment plausible and guaranteed by such great names. For what indeed is more plausible upon first inspection than the affirmation that the empirical sciences must be elevated to the rank of philosophy? It seems that too much mental liberty is needed to understand and to distinguish from the preceding, the somewhat different proposition that empiricism (empirical philosophy) must certainly be elevated to the rank of non-empirical philosophy, but that the empirical sciences must be left in peace to their own methods, without any attempt to render perfect by means of extrinsic additions that which has in itself all the perfection of which it is capable. It seems that more intelligence than is usually met with is necessary in order to recognize that this last proposition does not establish a dualism of spirit and nature, of philosophy and the natural sciences, but for ever destroys every dualism by making of the natural sciences a merely practical formation of the spirit, which has no voice in the assembly of the philosophical sciences, as the object which it has created has no reality. An ultimate tendency can be discerned in the complex movement of the day toward a Philosophy of nature. This is the attainment of the consciousness that reality is on this side of the classifications of the natural sciences, and that the natural sciences must be retranslated into history, by means of a historical consideration (concrete and not abstract) of the facts that are called natural. But this tendency is not something that will attain its end in a near or in a distant future. It has always shown its value and shows it also to-day; it can be recommended and promoted, but neither more nor less than every other legitimate form of spiritual activity can be recommended and promoted. Classifications are classifications; and what man really seeks out, what continually enriches the empirical sciences, is always the history of nature,—the series of facts, which, as we know, can be distinguished only in an empirical manner from the history of man, and which along with this constitutes History without genitive or adjective; history, which cannot even be strictly called history of the spirit, for the Spirit is, itself, History.
[1] See my Essay on Hegel, chap. ix. (What is living, etc., of Hegel, tr. D. Ainslie).