Human beings cannot, of course, wholly transcend human nature; something subjective, if only the interest that determines the direction of our attention, must remain in all our thought. But scientific philosophy comes nearer to objectivity than any other human pursuit, and gives us, therefore, the closest constant and the most intimate relation with the outer world that it is possible to achieve. To the primitive mind, everything is either friendly or hostile; but experience has shown that friendliness and hostility are not the conceptions by which the world is to be understood. Scientific philosophy thus represents, though as yet only in a nascent condition, a higher form of thought than any pre-scientific belief or imagination, and, like every approach to self-transcendence, it brings with it a rich reward in increase of scope and breadth and comprehension. Evolutionism, in spite of its appeals to particular scientific facts, fails to be a truly scientific philosophy because of its slavery to time, its ethical preoccupations, and its predominant interest in our mundane concerns and destiny. A truly scientific philosophy will be more humble, more piecemeal, more arduous, offering less glitter of outward mirage to flatter fallacious hopes, but more indifferent to fate, and more capable of accepting the world without the tyrannous imposition of our human and temporary demands.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] All the above quotations are from Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (2nd ed., 1908), pp. 146-156.
[2] Republic, 514, translated by Davies and Vaughan.
[3] This section, and also one or two pages in later sections, have been printed in a course of Lowell lectures On our knowledge of the external world, published by the Open Court Publishing Company. But I have left them here, as this is the context for which they were originally written.
[4] Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 1.
[5] Whinfield's translation of the Masnavi (Trübner, 1887), p. 34.
[6] Ethics, Bk. IV, Prop. LXII.
[7] Ib., Pt. IV, Df. I.