International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1 / Philosophy and Metaphysics

by Unknown

This carries the inquiry to the second part of it, that of the Philosophical Methods. Here I recount these in a series of six: the Dogmatic, the Skeptical, the Critical, the Pragmatic, the Genetic, the Dialectic. These, I show, in spite of the tendency of the earlier members in the series to over-emphasis, all have their place and function in the development of a complete philosophy, and in fact form an ascending series in methodic effectiveness, all that precede the last being taken up into the comprehensive Critical Rationalism of the last. Methodology thus passes upward, over the ascending and widening roadways of (1) Intuition and Deduction; (2) Experience and Induction; (3) Intuition and Experience adjusted by Critical Limits; (4) Skepticism reinforced and made quasi-affirmative by Desire and Will; (5) Empiricism enlarged by substitution of cosmic and psychic history for subjective consciousness; (6) Enlightened return to a Rationalism critically established by the inclusion of the preceding elements, and by the sifting and the grading of the Fundamental Concepts through their behavior when tested by the effort to make them universal. In this way, the methods fall into a System, the organic principle of which is this principle of Dialectic, which proves itself alone able to establish necessary truths; that is, truths indeed,—judgments that are seen to exclude their opposites, because, in the attempt to substitute the opposite, the place of it is still filled by the judgment which it aims to dislodge.

And now, with your favoring leave, I will read the excerpt from my larger text.

The task to which, in an especial sense, the cultivators of philosophy are summoned by the plans of the present Congress of Arts and Science, is certainly such as to stir an ambition to achieve it. At the same time, it tempers eagerness by its vast difficulty, and the apprehension lest this may prove insuperable. The task, the officers of the Congress tell us, is no less than to promote the unification of all human knowledge. It requires, then, the reduction of the enormous detail in our present miscellany of sciences and arts, which to a general glance, or even to a more intimate view, presents a confusion of differences that seems overwhelming, to a system nevertheless clearly harmonious,—founded, that is to say, upon universal principles which control all differences by explaining them, and which therefore, in the last resort, themselves flow lucidly from a single supreme principle. Simply to state this meaning of the task set us, is enough to awaken the doubt of its practicability.

This doubt, we are bound to confess, has more and more impressed itself upon the general mind, the farther this has advanced in the experience of scientific discovery. The very increase in the multiplicity and complexity of facts and their causal groupings increases the feeling that at the root of things there is "a final inexplicability"—total reality seems, more and more, too vast, too profound, for us to grasp or to fathom. And yet, strangely enough, this increasing sense of mysterious vastness has not in the least prevented the modern mind from more and more asserting, with a steadily increasing insistence, the essential and unchangeable unity of that whole of things which to our ordinary experience, and even to all our sciences, appears such an endless and impenetrable complex of differences,—yes, of contradictions. In fact, this assertion of the unity of all things, under the favorite name of the Unity of Nature, is the pet dogma of modern science; or, rather, to speak with right accuracy, it is the stock-in-trade of a philosophy of science, current among many of the leaders of modern science; for every such assertion, covering, as it tacitly and unavoidably does, a view about the absolute whole, is an assertion belonging to the province of philosophy, before whose tribunal it must come for the assessment of its value. The presuppositions of all the special sciences, and, above all, this presupposition of the Unity and Uniformity of Nature, common to all of them, must thus come back for justification and requisite definition to philosophy—that uppermost and all-inclusive form of cognition which addresses itself to the whole as whole. In their common assertion of the Unity of Nature, the exponents of modern science come unawares out of their own province into quite another and a higher; and in doing so they show how unawares they come, by presenting in most instances the curious spectacle of proclaiming at once their increasing belief in the unity of things, and their increasing disbelief in its penetrability by our intelligence:—

In's Innere der Natur,
Dringt kein erschaffner Geist,

is their chosen poet's expression of their philosophic mood. Curious we have the right to call this state of the scientific mind, because it is to critical reflection so certainly self-contradictory. How can there be a real unity belonging to what is inscrutable?—what evidence of unity can there be, except in intelligible and explanatory continuity?

But, at all events, this very mood of agnostic self-contradiction, into which the development of the sciences casts such a multitude of minds, brings them,—brings all of us,—as already indicated, into that court of philosophy where alone such issues lawfully belong, and where alone they can be adjudicated. If the unification of the sciences can be made out to be real by making out its sole sufficient condition, namely, that there is a genuine, and not a merely nominal, unity in the whole of reality itself,—a unity that explains because it is itself, not simply intelligible, but the only completely intelligible of things,—this desirable result must be the work of philosophy. However difficult the task may be, it is rightly put upon us who belong to the Department listed first among the twenty-four in the programme of this representative Congress.

I cannot but express my own satisfaction, as a member of this Department, nor fail to extend my congratulations to you who are my colleagues in it, that the Congress, in its programme, takes openly the affirmative on this question of the possible unification of knowledge. The Congress has thus declared beforehand for the practicability of the task it sets. It has even declared for its not distant accomplishment; indeed, not impossibly, its accomplishment through the transactions of the Congress itself; and it indicates, by no uncertain signs, the leading, the determining part that philosophy must have in the achievement. In fact, the authorities of the Congress themselves suggest a solution of their own for their problem. In their programme we see a renewed Hierarchy of the Sciences, and at the summit of this appears now again, after so long a period of humiliating obscuration, the figure of Philosophy, raised anew to that supremacy, as Queen of the Sciences, which had been hers from the days of Plato to those of Copernicus, but which she began to lose when modern physical and historical research entered upon its course of sudden development, and which, until recently, she has continued more and more to lose as the sciences have advanced in their career of discoveries,—ever more unexpected, more astonishing, yet more convincing and more helpful to the welfare of mankind. May this sign of her recovered empire not fail! If we rejoice at the token, the Congress has made it our part to see that the title is vindicated. It is ours to show this normative function of philosophy, this power to reign as the unifying discipline in the entire realm of our possible knowledge; to show it by showing that the very nature of philosophy—its elemental concepts and its directing ideals, its methods taken in their systematic succession—is such as must result in a view of universal reality that will supply the principle at once giving rise to all the sciences and connecting them all into one harmonious whole.

Such, and so grave, my honored colleagues, is the duty assigned to this hour. Sincerely can I say, Would it had fallen to stronger hands than mine! But since to mine it has been committed, I will undertake it in no disheartened spirit; rather, in that temper of animated hope in which the whole Congress has been conceived and planned. And I draw encouragement from the place, and its associations, where we are assembled—from its historic connections not only with the external expansion of our country, but with its growth in culture, and especially with its growth in the cultivation of philosophy. For your speaker, at least, can never forget that here in St. Louis, the metropolis of the region by which our national domain was in the Louisiana Purchase so enlarged,—here was the centre of a movement in philosophic study that has proved to be of national import. It is fitting that we all, here to-day, near to the scene itself, commemorate the public service done by our present National Commissioner of Education and his group of enthusiastic associates, in beginning here, in the middle years of the preceding century, those studies of Kant and his great idealistic successors that unexpectedly became the nucleus of a wider and more penetrating study of philosophy in all parts of our country. It is with quickened memories belonging to the spot where, more than five-and-thirty years ago, it was my happy fortune to take some part with Dr. Harris and his companions, that I begin the task assigned me. The undertaking seems less hopeless when I can here recall the names and the congenial labors of Harris, of Davidson, of Brockmeyer, of Snider, of Watters, of Jones,—half of them now gone from life. They "builded better than they knew;" and, humbly as they may themselves have estimated their ingenuous efforts to gain acquaintance with the greatest thoughts, history will not fail to take note of what they did, as marking one of the turning-points in the culture of our nation. The publication of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, granting all the subtractions claimed by its critics on the score of defects (of which its conductors were perhaps only too sensible), was an influence that told in all our circles of philosophical study, and thence in the whole of our social as well as our academic life.

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