Chapter XXXV: Section D: RELIGIOUS WORK. (Hall 1, September 24, 3 p. m.) (8)

In spite of all this, however, the last two decades or more have shown certain hopeful tendencies and notable achievements, looking toward the reconstruction of systematic philosophy. In this attempt to bring order out of confusion, to enable calm, prolonged, and reflective thinking to build into its structure the riches of the new material which the evolution of the race has secured, a place of honor ought to be given to France, where so much has been done of late to blend with clearness of style and independence of thought that calm reflective and critical judgment which looks all sides of human experience sympathetically but bravely in the face. In psychology Ribot, and in philosophy, Fouillée, Renouvier, Secrétan, and others, deserve grateful recognition. No friend of philosophy can, I think, fail to recognize the probable benefits to be derived from that movement with which such names as Mach and Ostwald in Germany are connected, and which is sounding the call to the men of science to clear up the really distressing obscurity and confusion which has so long clung to their fundamental conceptions; and to examine anew the significance of their assumptions, with a view to the construction of a new and improved doctrine of the Being of the World. And if to these names we add those of the numerous distinguished investigators of psychology as pedagogic to philosophy, and, in philosophy, of Deussen, Eucken, von Hartmann, Riehl, Wundt, and others, we may well affirm that new light will continue to break forth from that country which so powerfully aroused the whole Western World at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In Great Britain the name and works of Thomas Hill Green have influenced the attempts at a reconstruction of systematic philosophy in a manner to satisfy at one and the same time both the facts and laws of science and the æsthetical, ethical, and religious ideals of the age, in a very considerable degree. And in this attempt, both as it expresses itself in theoretical psychology and in the various branches of philosophical discipline, writers like Bradley, Fraser, Flint, Hodgson, Seth, Stout, Ward, and others, have taken a conspicuous part. Nor are there wanting in Holland, Italy, and even in Sweden and Russia, thinkers equally worthy of recognition, and recognized, in however limited and unworthy fashion, in their own land. The names of those in America who have labored most faithfully, and succeeded best, in this enormous task of reconstructing philosophy in a systematic way, and upon a basis of history and of modern science, I do not need to mention; they are known, or they surely ought to be known, to us all.

In attempting to summarize the gains of philosophy during the last hundred years, we should remind ourselves that progress in philosophy does not consist in the final settlement, and so in the "solving" of any of its great problems. Indeed, the relations of philosophy to its grounds in experience, and the nature of its method and of its ideal, are such that its progress can never be expected to put an end to itself. But the content of the total experience of humanity has been greatly enriched during the last century; and the critical and reflective thought of trained minds has been led toward a more profound and comprehensive theory of Reality, and toward a doctrine of values that shall be more available for the improvement of man's political, social, and religious life.

In view of this truth respecting the limitations of systematic philosophy, I think we may hold that certain negative results, which are customarily adduced as unfavorable to the claims of philosophical progress, are really signs of improvement during the latter half of the nineteenth century. One is an increased spirit of reserve and caution, and an increased modesty of claims. This result is perhaps significant of riper wisdom and more trustworthy maturity. Kant believed himself to have established for philosophy a system of apodeictic conclusions, which were as completely forever to have displaced the old dogmatism as Copernicus had displaced the Ptolemaic astronomy. But the steady pressure of historical and scientific studies has made it increasingly difficult for any sane thinker to claim for any system of thinking such demonstrable validity. May we not hope that the students of the particular sciences, to whom philosophy owes so much of its enforced sanity and sane modesty, will themselves soon share freely of the philosophic spirit with regard to their own metaphysics and ethical and religious standpoints, touching the Ultimate Reality? Even when the recoil from the overweening self-satisfaction and crass complacency of the earlier part of the last century takes the form of melancholy, or of acute sadness, or even of a mild despair of philosophy, I am not sure that the last state of that man is not better than the first.

In connection with this improvement in spirit, we may also note an improvement in the method of philosophy. The purely speculative method, with its intensely interesting but indefensible disregard of concrete facts, and of the conclusions of the particular sciences, is no longer in favor even among the most ardent devotees and advocates of the superiority of philosophy to those sciences. At the same time, philosophy may quite properly continue to maintain its position of independent critic, as well as of docile pupil, toward the particular sciences.

In the same connection must be mentioned the hopeful fact that the last two or three decades have shown a decided improvement in the relations of philosophy toward the positive sciences. There are plain signs of late that the attitude of antagonism, or of neglect, which prevailed so largely during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, is to be replaced by one of friendship and mutual helpfulness. And, indeed, science and philosophy cannot long or greatly flourish without reciprocal aid, if by science we mean a true _Wissenschaft_ and if we also mean to base philosophy upon our total experience. For science and philosophy are really engaged upon the same task,--to _understand and to appreciate the totality of man's_ _experience_. They, therefore, have essential and permanent relations of dependence for material, for inspiration and correction, and for other forms of helpfulness. While, then, their respective spheres have been more clearly delimited during the last century, their interdependence has been more forcefully exhibited. Both of them have been developing a systematic exposition of the universe. Both of them desire to enlarge and deepen the conception of the Being of the World, as made known to the totality of human experience, in its Unity of nature and significance. We cannot believe that the end of the nineteenth century would sustain the charge which Fontenelle made in the closing years of the seventeenth century: "_L'Académie des Sciences ne prend la nature que par petites parcelles_." Science itself now bids us regard the Universe as a dynamical Unity, teleologically conceived, because in a process of evolution under the control of immanent ideas. Philosophy assumes the same point of view, rather at the beginning than at the end of defining its purpose; and so feels a certain glad leap at its heart-strings, and an impulse to hold out the hand to science, when it hears such an utterance as that of Poincaré: _Ce n'est pas le méchanisme le vrai, le seul but; c'est l'unité_.

Shall we not say, then, that this double-faced but wholly true lesson has been learned: namely, that the so-called philosophy of nature has no sound foundation and no safeguard against vagaries of every sort, unless it follows the lead of the positive sciences of nature; but that the sciences themselves can never afford a full satisfaction to the legitimate aspirations of human reason unless they, too, contribute to the philosophy of nature--writ large and conceived of as a real-ideal Unity.

That nature, as known and knowable by man, is a great artist, and that man's æsthetical consciousness may be trusted as having a certain ontological value, is the postulate properly derived from the considerations advanced in the latest, and in some respects the most satisfactory, of the three Critiques of Kant. The ideal way of looking at natural phenomena which so delighted the mind of Goethe has now been placed on broad and sound foundations by the fruitful industries of many workmen,--such as Karl Ernst von Baer and Charles Darwin,--whose morphological and evolutionary conceptions of the universe have transformed the current conceptions of cosmic processes. But the world of physical and natural phenomena has thereby been rendered not less, but more, of a Cosmos, an orderly totality.

In addition to these more general but somewhat vague evaluations of the progress of philosophy during the nineteenth century, we are certainly called upon to face the question whether, after all, any advance has been made toward the more satisfactory solution of the definite problems which the Kantian criticism left unsolved. To this question I believe an affirmative answer may be given in accordance with the facts of history. It will be remembered that the first of these problems was the epistemological. Certainly no little improvement has been made in the psychology of cognition. We can no longer repeat the mistakes of Kant, either with respect to the uncritical assumptions he makes regarding the origin of knowledge in the so-called "faculties" of the human mind or regarding the analysis of those faculties and their interdependent relations. It is not the Scottish philosophy alone which has led to the conclusion that, in the word of the late Professor Adamson, "What are called acts or states of consciousness are _not_ rightly conceived of as having for their objects their own modes of existence as ways in which a subject is modified." And in the larger manner both science and philosophy, in their negations and their affirmations, and even in their points of view, have better grounds for the faith of human reason in its power progressively to master the knowledge of Reality than was the case a hundred years ago. Nor has the skepticism of the same era, whether by shallow scoffing at repeated failures, or by pious sighs over the limitations of human reason, or by critical analysis of the cognitive faculties "according to well-established principles," succeeded in limiting our speculative pretensions to the sphere of possible experience,--in the Kantian meaning both of "principles" and of "experience." But what both science and philosophy are compelled to agree upon as a common underlying principle is this: The proof of the most fundamental presuppositions, as well as of the latest more scientifically established conclusions, of both science and philosophy, is the assistance they afford in the satisfactory explanation of the totality of racial experience.

In the evolution of the ontological problem, as compared with the form in which it was left by the critical philosophy, the past century has also made some notable advances. To deny this would be to discredit the development of human knowledge so far as to say that we know no more about what nature is, and man is, than was known a hundred years ago. To say this, however, would not be to speak truth of fact. And here we may not unnaturally grow somewhat impatient with that metaphysical fallacy which places an impassable gulf between Reality and Experience. No reality is, of course, cognizable or believable by man which does not somehow show its presence in his total experience. But no growth of experience is possible without involving increase of knowledge representing Reality. For Reality is no absent and dead, or statical, Ding-an-Sich. Cognition itself is a commerce of realities. And are there not plain signs that the more thoughtful men of science are becoming less averse to the recognition of the truth of ontological philosophy; namely, that the deeper meaning of their own studies is grasped only when they recognize that they are ever face to face with what they call Energy and we call Will, and with what they call laws and we call Mind as significant of the progressive realization of immanent ideas. This Ultimate Reality is so profound that neither science nor philosophy will ever sound all its depths, and so comprehensive as more than to justify all the categories of both.

Probably, on the whole, there has been less progress made toward a satisfactory solution of the problems offered by the value-judgments of ethics and religion, in the form in which these problems were left by the critical philosophy. The century has illustrated the truth of Falckenberg's statement: "In periods which have given birth to a skeptical philosophy, one never looks in vain for the complementary phenomenon of mysticism." Twice during the century the so-called "faith-philosophy," or philosophy of feeling, has been borne to the front, to raise a bulwark against the advancing hosts of agnostics--occasioned in the first period by the negations of the Kantian criticism, and in the second by the positive conclusions of the physical and biological sciences. This form of protesting against the neglect or disparagement of important factors which belong to man's æsthetical, ethical, and religious experience, is reasonable and must be heard. But the extravagances with which these neglected factors have been posited and appraised, to the neglect of the more definitively scientific and strictly logical, is to be deplored. The great work before the philosophy of the present age is the reconciliation of the historical and scientific conceptions of the Universe with the legitimate sentiments and ideals of art, morality, and religion. But surely neither rationalism nor "faith-philosophy" is justified in pouring out the living child with the muddy water of the bath.

IV. The attempt to survey the present situation of philosophy, and to predict its immediate future, is embarrassed by the fact that we are all immersed in it, are a part of its spirit and present form. But if nearness has its embarrassments, it has also its benefits. Those who are amidst the tides of life may know better, in a way, how these tides are tending and what is their present strength, than do those who survey them from distant, cool, and exalted heights. "_Für jeden einzelnen bildet der Vater und der Sohn eine greifbare Kette von Lebensereignungen und Erfahrungen._" The very intensely vital and formative but unformed condition of systematic philosophy--its protoplasmic character--contains promises of a new life. If we may believe the view of Hegel that the systematizing of the thought of any age marks the time when the peculiar living thought of that age is passing into a period of decay, we may certainly claim for our present age the prospect of a prolonged vitality.

The nineteenth century has left us with a vast widening of the horizon,--outward into space, backward in time, inward toward the secrets of life, and downward into the depths of Reality. With this there has been an increase in the profundity of the conviction of the spiritual unity of the race. In the consideration of all of its problems in the immediate future and in the coming century--so far as we can see forward into this century--philosophy will have to reckon with certain marked characteristics of the human spirit which form at the same time inspiring stimuli and limiting conditions of its endeavors and achievements. Chief among these are the greater and more firmly established principles of the positive sciences, and the prevalence of the historical spirit and method in the investigation of all manner of problems. These influences have given shape to the conception which, although it is as yet by no means in its final or even in thoroughly self-consistent form, is destined powerfully to affect our philosophical as well as our scientific theories. This conception is that of Development. But philosophy, considered as the product of critical and reflective thinking over the more ultimate problems of nature and of human life, is itself a development. And it is now, more than ever before, a development interdependently connected with all the other great developments.

Philosophy, in order to adapt itself to the spirit of the age, must welcome and cultivate the freest critical inquiry into its own methods and results, and must cheerfully submit itself to the demand for evidences which has its roots in the common and essential experience of the race. Moreover, the growth of the spirit of democracy, which, on the one hand, is distinctly unfavorable to any system of philosophy whose tenets and formulas seem to have only an academic validity or a merely esoteric value, and which, on the other hand, requires for its satisfaction a more tenable, helpful, and universally applicable theory of life and reality, cannot fail, in my judgment, to influence favorably the development of philosophy. In the union of the speculative and the practical; in the harmonizing of the interests of the positive sciences, with their judgments of fact and law, and the interests of art, morality, and religion, with their value-judgments and ideals; in the synthesis of the truths of Realism and Idealism, as they have existed hitherto and now exist in separateness or antagonism; in a union that is not accomplished by a shallow eclecticism, but by a sincere attempt to base philosophy upon the totality of human experience;--in such a union as this must we look for the real progress of philosophy in the coming century.

Just now there seem to be two somewhat heterogeneous and not altogether well-defined tendencies toward the reconstruction of systematic philosophy, both of which are powerful and represent real truths conquered by ages of intellectual industry and conflict. These two, however, need to be internally harmonized, in order to obtain a satisfactory statement of the development of the last century. They may be called the evolutionary and the idealistic. The one tendency lays emphasis on mechanism, the other on spirit. Yet it is most interesting to notice how many of the early workmen in the investigation of the principle of the conservation and correlation of energy took their point of departure from distinctly teleological and spiritual conceptions. "I was led," said Colding,--to take an extreme case,--at the Natural Science Congress at Innsbruck, 1869, "to the idea of the constancy of national forces by the religious conception of life." And even Moleschott, in his _Autobiography_, posthumously published, declares: "I myself was well aware that the whole conception might be converted; for since all matter is a bearer of force, endowed with force or penetrated with spirit, it would be just as correct to call it a spiritualistic conception." On the other hand, the modern, better instructed Idealism is much inclined, both from the psychological and from the more purely philosophical points of view, to regard with duly profound respect all the facts and laws of that mechanism of Reality, which certainly is not merely the dependent construction of the human mind functioning according to a constitution that excludes it from Reality, but is rather the ever increasingly more trustworthy revealer of Reality. This tendency to a union of the claims of both Realism and Idealism is profoundly influencing the solution of each one of these problems which the Kantian criticism left to the philosophy of the nineteenth century. In respect of the epistemological problem, philosophy--as I have already said--is not likely again to repeat the mistakes either of Kant or of the dogmatism which his criticism so effectually overthrew. It was a wise remark of the physician Johann Benjamin Erhard, in a letter dated May 19, 1794, _à propos_ of Fichte: "The philosophy which _proceeds_ from a _single_ fundamental principle, and pretends to deduce everything from it, is and always will remain a piece of artificial sophistry: only that philosophy which _ascends_ to the highest principle and exhibits everything else in perfect harmony with it, is the true one." This at least ought--one would say--to have been made clear by the century of discussion over the epistemological problem, since Kant. You cannot _deduce_ the Idea from the Reality, or the Reality from the Idea. The problem of knowledge is not, as Fichte held in the form of a fundamental assumption, an alternative of this sort. The Idea _and_ Reality are, the rather already there, and to be recognized as in a living unity, in every cognitive experience. Psychology is constantly adding something toward the problem of cognition as a problem in synthesis; and is then in a way contributing to the better scientific understanding of the philosophical postulate which is the confidence of human reason in its ability, by the harmonious use of all its powers, progressively to reach a better and fuller knowledge of Reality.

The ontological problem will necessarily always remain the unsolved, in the sense of the very incompletely solved problem of philosophy. But as long as human experience develops, and as long as philosophy bestows upon experience the earnest and candid efforts of reflecting minds, the solution of the ontological problem will be approached, but never fully reached. That Being of the World which Kant, in the negative and critical part of his work, left as an X, unknown and unknowable, the last century has filled with a new and far richer content than it ever had before. Especially has this century changed the conception of the Unity of the Universe in such manner that it can never return again to its ancient form. On the one hand, this Unity cannot be made comprehensible in terms of any one scientific or philosophical principle or law. Science and philosophy are both moving farther and farther away from the hope of comprehending the variety and infinite manifoldness of the Absolute in terms of any one side or aspect of man's complex experience. But, on the other hand, the confidence in this essential Unity is not diminished, but is the rather confirmed. As humanity itself develops, as the Selfhood of man grows in the experience of the world which is its own environment, and of the world within which it is its own true Self, humanity may reasonably hope to win an increased, and increasingly valid, cognition of the Being of the World as the Absolute Self.

Closely connected, and in a way essentially identical with the ontological problem, is that of the origin, validity, and rational value of the ideas of humanity. May it not be said that the nineteenth century transfers to the twentieth an increased interest in and a heightened appreciation of the so-called practical problems of philosophy. Science and philosophy certainly ought to combine--and are they not ready to combine?--in the effort to secure a more nearly satisfactory understanding and solution of the problems afforded by the æsthetical, ethical, and religious sentiments and ideals of the race. To philosophy this combination means that it shall be more fruitful than ever before in promoting the uplift and betterment of mankind. The fulfillment of the practical mission of philosophy involves the application of its conceptions and principles to education, politics, morals, as a matter of law and of custom, and to religion as matter both of rational faith and of the conduct of life.

How, then, can this brief and imperfect sketch of the outline of the development of philosophy in the nineteenth century better come to a close than by words of encouragement and of exhortation as well. There are, in my judgment, the plainest signs that the somewhat too destructive and even nihilistic tendencies of the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century have reached their limit; that the strife of science and philosophy, and of both with religion, is lessening, and is being rapidly displaced by the spirit of mutual fairness and reciprocal helpfulness; and that reasonable hopes of a new and a splendid era of reconstruction in philosophy may be entertained. For I cannot agree with the _dictum_ of a recent writer on the subject, that "the sciences are coming less and less to admit of a synthesis, and not at all of a synthetic philosopher."

On the contrary, I hold that, with an increased confidence in the capacity of human reason to discover and validate the most secret and profound, as well as the most comprehensive, of truths, philosophy may well put aside some of its shyness and hesitancy, and may resume more of that audacity of imagination, sustained by ontological convictions, which characterized its work during the first half of the nineteenth century. And if the latter half of the twentieth century does for the constructions of the first half of the same century, what the latter half of the nineteenth century did for the first half of that century, this new criticism will only be to illustrate the way in which the human spirit makes every form of its progress.

Therefore, a summons of all helpers, in critical but fraternal spirit, to this work of reconstruction, for which two generations of enormous advance in the positive sciences has gathered new material, and for the better accomplishment of which both the successes and the failures of the philosophy of the nineteenth century have prepared the men of the twentieth century, is the winsome and imperative voice of the hour.

SECTION A--METAPHYSICS

SECTION A--METAPHYSICS

(_Hall 6, September 21, 10 a. m._)

CHAIRMAN: PROFESSOR A. C. ARMSTRONG, Wesleyan University.
SPEAKERS: PROFESSOR A. E. TAYLOR, McGill University, Montreal.
PROFESSOR ALEXANDER T. ORMOND, Princeton University.
SECRETARY: PROFESSOR A. O. LOVEJOY, Washington University.

The Chairman of the Section, Professor A. C. Armstrong, of Wesleyan University, in opening the meeting referred to the continued vitality of metaphysics as shown by its repeated revivals after the many destructive attacks upon it in the later modern times: he congratulated the Section on the fact that the principal speakers were scholars who had made notable contributions to metaphysical theory.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN METAPHYSICS AND THE OTHER SCIENCES

BY PROFESSOR ALFRED EDWARD TAYLOR

[Alfred Edward Taylor, Frothingham Professor of Philosophy,
McGill University, Montreal, Canada. b. Oundle, England,
December 22, 1869. M.A. Oxford. Fellow, Merton College,
Oxford, 1891-98, 1902-; Lecturer in Greek and Philosophy,
Owens College, Manchester, 1896-1903; Assistant Examiner to
University of Wales, 1899-1903; Green Moral Philosophy
Prizeman, Oxford, 1899; Frothingham Professor of Philosophy,
McGill University, 1903-; Member Philosophical Society,
Owens College, American Philosophical Association. Author of
_The Problem of Conduct_; _Elements of Metaphysics_.]

When we seek to determine the place of metaphysics in the general scheme of human knowledge, we are at once confronted by an initial difficulty of some magnitude. There seems, in fact, to be no one universally accepted definition of our study, and even no very general consensus among its votaries as to the problems with which the metaphysician ought to concern himself. This difficulty, serious as it is, does not, however, justify the suspicion that our science is, like alchemy or astrology, an illusion, and its high-sounding title a mere "idol of the market-place," one of those _nomina rerum quae non sunt_ against which the Chancellor Bacon has so eloquently warned mankind. If it is hard to determine precisely the scope of metaphysics, it is no less difficult to do the same thing for the undoubtedly legitimate sciences of logic and mathematics. And in all three cases the absence of definition merely shows that we are dealing with branches of knowledge which are, so to say, still in the making. It is not until the first principles of science are already firmly laid beyond the possibility of cavil that we must look for general agreement as to its boundary lines, though excellent work may be done, long before this point has been reached, in the establishment of individual principles and deduction of consequences from them. To revert to the parallel cases I have just cited, many mathematical principles of the highest importance are formulated in the _Elements_ of Euclid, and many logical principles in the _Organon_ of Aristotle; yet it is only in our own time that it has become possible to offer a general definition either of logic or of mathematics, and even now it would probably be true to say that the majority of logicians and mathematicians trouble themselves very little about the precise definition of their respective studies.

The state of our science then compels me to begin this address with a more or less arbitrary, because provisional, definition of the term metaphysics, for which I claim no more than that it may serve to indicate with approximate accuracy the class of problems which I shall have in view in my subsequent use of the word. By metaphysics, then, I propose to understand the inquiry which used formerly to be known as ontology, that is, the investigation into the general character which belongs to real Being as such, the science, in Aristotelian phraseology, of onta hê onta. Or, if the term "real" be objected against as ambiguous, I would suggest as an alternative account the statement that metaphysics is the inquiry into the general character by which the content of _true_ assertions is distinguished from that of _false_ assertions. The two definitions here offered will, I think, be found equivalent when it is borne in mind that what the second of them speaks of is exclusively the _content_ which is asserted as true in a true proposition, not the process of true assertion, which, like all other processes in the highest cerebral centres, falls under the consideration of the vastly different sciences of psychology and cerebral physiology. Of the two equivalent forms of statement, the former has perhaps the advantage of making it most clear that it is ultimately upon the objective distinction between the reality and the unreality of that which is asserted for truth, and not upon any psychological peculiarity in the process of assertion itself that the distinction between true and untrue rests, while the second may be useful in guarding against misconceptions that might be suggested by too narrow an interpretation of the term "reality," such as, _e. g._, the identification of the "real" with what is revealed by sensuous perception.

From the acceptance of such a definition two important consequences would follow. (1) The first is that metaphysics is at once sharply discriminated from any study of the psychical _process_ of knowledge, if indeed, there can be any such study distinct from the psychology of conception and belief, which is clearly not itself the science we have in view. For the psychological laws of the formation of concepts and beliefs are exemplified equally in the discovery and propagation of truth and of error. And thus it is in vain to look to them for any explanation of the difference between the two. Nor does the otherwise promising extension of Darwinian conceptions of the "struggle for existence" and the "survival of the fittest" to the field of opinions and convictions appear to affect this conclusion. Such considerations may indeed assist us to understand how true convictions in virtue of their "usefulness" gradually come to be established and extended, but they require to presume the truth of these convictions as an antecedent condition of their "usefulness" and consequent establishment. I should infer, then, that it is a mistake in principle to seek to replace ontology by a "theory of knowledge," and should even be inclined to question the very possibility of such a theory as distinct from metaphysics on the one hand and empirical psychology on the other. (2) The second consequence is of even greater importance. The inquiry into the general character by which the contents of true assertions are discriminated from the contents of false assertions must be carefully distinguished from any investigation into the truth or falsehood of special assertions. To ask how in the end truth differs from falsehood is to raise an entirely different problem from that created by asking whether a given statement is to be regarded as true or false. The distinction becomes particularly important when we have to deal with what Locke would call assertions of "real existence," _i. e._, assertions as to the occurrence of particular events in the temporal order. All such assertions depend, in part at least, upon the admission of what we may style "empirical" evidence, the immediate unanalyzed witness of simple apprehension to the occurrence of an alleged matter of fact. Thus it would follow from our proposed conception of metaphysics that metaphysics is in principle incapable either of establishing or refuting any assertion as to the details of our immediate experience of empirical fact, though it may have important bearings upon any theory of the general nature of true Being which we may seek to found upon our alleged experiences. In a word, if our conception be the correct one, the functions of a science of metaphysics in respect of our knowledge of the temporal sequence of events psychical and physical must be purely critical, never constructive,--a point to which I shall presently have to recur.

One more general reflection, and we may pass to the consideration of the relation of metaphysics to the various alreadyorganized branches of human knowledge more in detail. The admission that there is, or may be, such a study as we have described, seems of itself to involve the recognition that definite knowledge about the character of what really "is," is attainable, and thus to commit us to a position of sharp opposition both to consistent and thorough-going agnosticism and also to the latent agnosticism of Kantian and neo-Kantian "critical philosophy." In recognizing ontology as a legitimate investigation, we revert in principle to the "dogmatist" position common, _e. g._, to Plato, to Spinoza and to Leibniz, that there is genuine truth which can be known, and that this genuine truth is not confined to statements about the process of knowing itself. In fact, the "critical" view that the only certain truth is truth about the process of knowing seems to be inherently self-contradictory. For the knowledge that such a proposition as, _e. g._, "I know only the laws of my own apprehending activity," is true, would itself be knowledge not about the process of knowing but about the content known. Thus metaphysics, conceived as the science of the general character which distinguishes truth from falsehood, presupposes throughout all knowledge the presence of what we may call a "transcendent object," that is, a content which is never identical with the process by which it is apprehended, though it may no doubt be maintained that the two, the process and its content, if distinct, are yet not ultimately separable. That they are in point of fact not ultimately separable would seem to be the doctrine which, under various forms of statement, is common to and characteristic of all the "idealistic" systems of metaphysics. So much then in defense of a metaphysical point of view which seems to be closely akin to that of Mr. Bradley and of Professor Royce, to mention only two names of contemporary philosophers, and which might, I think, for the purpose of putting it in sharp opposition to the "neo-Kantian" view, not unfairly be called, if it is held to need a name, "neo-Leibnizian."

In passing on to discuss in brief the nature of the boundary lines which divide metaphysics from other branches of study, it seems necessary to start with a clear distinction between the "pure" or "formal" and the "applied" or "empirical" sciences, the more so as in the loose current employment of language the name "science" is frequently given exclusively to the latter. In every-day life, when we are told that a certain person is a "man of science," or as the detestable jargon of our time likes to say, a "scientist," we expect to find that he is, _e. g._, a geologist, a chemist, a biologist, or an electrician. We should be a little surprised to find on inquiry that our "man of science" was a pure mathematician, and probably more than a little to learn that he was a formal logician. The distinction between the pure and the empirical sciences may be roughly indicated by saying that the latter class comprises all those sciences which yield information about the particular details of the temporal order of events physical and psychical, whereas the pure sciences deal solely with the general characteristics either of all truths, or of all truths of some well-defined class. More exactly we may say that the marks by which an empirical is distinguished from a pure science are two. (1) The empirical sciences one and all imply the presence among their premises of empirical propositions, that is, propositions which assert the actual occurrence of some temporal fact, and depend upon the witness of immediate apprehension, either in the form of sense perception or in that of what is commonly called self-consciousness. In the vague language made current by Kant, they involve an appeal to some form of unanalyzed "intuition." The pure sciences, on the other hand, contain no empirical propositions either among their premises or their conclusions. The principles which form their premises are self-evidently true propositions, containing no reference to the actual occurrence of any event in the temporal order, and thus involving no appeal to any form of "intuition." And the conclusions established in a pure science are all rigidly logical deductions from such self-evident premises. That the universality of this distinction is still often overlooked even by professed writers on scientific method seems explicable by two simple considerations. On the one hand, it is easy to overlook the important distinction between a principle which is self-evident, that is, which cannot be denied without explicit falsehood, and a proposition affirmed on the warrant of the senses, because, though its denial cannot be seen to be obviously false, the senses appear on each fresh appeal to substantiate the assertion. Thus the Euclidean postulate about parallels was long falsely supposed to possess exactly the same kind of self-evidence as the _dictum de omni_ and the principle of identity which are part of the foundations of all logic. And further Kant, writing under the influence of this very confusion, has given wide popularity to the view that the best known of the pure sciences, that of mathematics, depends upon the admission of empirical premises in the form of an appeal to intuition of the kind just described. Fortunately the recent developments of arithmetic at the hands of such men as Weierstrass, Cantor, and Dedekind seem to have definitely refuted the Kantian view as far as general arithmetic, the pure science of number, is concerned, by proving that one and all of its propositions are _analytic_ in the strict sense of the word, that is, that they are capable of rigid deduction from self-evident premises, so that, in what regards arithmetic, we may say with Schröder that the famous Kantian question "how are synthetic judgments _a priori_ possible?" is now known to be meaningless. As regards geometry, the case appears to a non-mathematician like myself more doubtful. Those who hold with Schröder that geometry essentially involves, as Kant thought it did, an appeal to principles not self-evident and dependent upon an appeal to sensuous "intuition," are logically bound to conclude with him that geometry is an "empirical," or as W. K. Clifford called it, a "physical" science, different in no way from mechanics except in the relative paucity of the empirical premises presupposed, and to class it with the applied sciences. On the other hand, if Mr. Bertrand Russell should be successful in his promised demonstration that all the principles of geometry are deducible from a few premises which include nothing of the nature of an appeal to sensuous diagrams, geometry too would take its place among the pure sciences, but only on condition of our recognizing that its truths, like those of arithmetic, are one and all, as Leibniz held, strictly analytical. Thus we obtain as a first distinction between the pure and the empirical sciences the principle that the propositions of the former class are all analytical, those of the latter all synthetic. It is not the least of the services which France is now rendering to the study of philosophy that we are at last being placed by the labors of M. Couturat in a position to appreciate at their full worth the views of the first and greatest of German philosophers on this distinction, and to understand how marvelously they have been confirmed by the subsequent history of mathematics and of logic.

(2) A consequence of this distinction is that only the pure or formal sciences can be matter of rigid logical demonstration. Since the empirical or applied sciences one and all contain empirical premises, _i. e._, premises which we admit as true only because they have always appeared to be confirmed by the appeal to "intuition," and not because the denial of them can be shown to lead to falsehood, the conclusions to which they conduct us must one and all depend, in part at least, upon induction from actual observation of particular temporal sequences. This is as much as to say that all propositions in the applied sciences involve somewhere in the course of the reasoning by which they are established the appeal to the calculus of Probabilities, which is our one method of eliciting general results from the statistics supplied by observation or experiment. That this is the case with the more concrete among such applied sciences has long been universally acknowledged. That it is no less true of sciences of such wide range as mechanics may be said, I think, to have been definitely established in our own day by the work of such eminent physicists as Kirchhoff and Mach. In fact, the recent developments of the science of pure number, to which reference has been made in a preceding paragraph, combined with the creation of the "descriptive" theory of mechanics, may fairly be said to have finally vindicated the distinction drawn by Leibniz long ago between the truths of reason and the truths of empirical fact, a distinction which the Kantian trend of philosophical speculation tended during the greater part of the nineteenth century to obscure, while it was absolutely ignored by the empiricist opponents of metaphysics both in England and in Germany. The philosophical consequences of a revival of the distinction are, I conceive, of far-reaching importance. On the one side, recognition of the empirical and contingent character of all general propositions established by induction appears absolutely fatal to the current mechanistic conception of the universe as a realm of purposeless sequences unequivocally determined by unalterable "laws of nature," a result which has in recent years been admirably illustrated for the English-speaking world by Professor Ward's well-known Gifford lectures on "Naturalism and Agnosticism." Laws of physical nature, on the empiristic view of applied science, can mean no more than observed regularities, obtained by the application of the doctrine of chances,--regularities which we are indeed justified in accepting with confidence as the basis for calculation of the future course of temporal sequence, but which we have no logical warrant for treating as ultimate truths about the final constitution of things. Thus, for example, take the common assumption that our physical environment is composed of a multitude of particles each in every respect the exact counterpart of every other. Reflection upon the nature of the evidence by which this conclusion, if supported at all, has to be supported, should convince us that at most all that the statement ought to mean is that individual differences between the elementary constituents of the physical world need not be allowed for in devising practical formulae for the intelligent anticipation of events. When the proposition is put forward as an absolute truth and treated as a reason for denying the ultimate spirituality of the world, we are well within our rights in declining the consequence on the logical ground that conclusions from an empirical premise must in their own nature be themselves empirical and contingent.

On the other hand, the extreme empiricism which treats all knowledge whatsoever as merely relative to the total psychical state of the knower, and therefore in the end problematic, must, I apprehend, go down before any serious investigation into the nature of the analytic truths of arithmetic, a consequence which seems to be of some relevance in connection with the philosophic view popularly known as Pragmatism. Thus I should look to the coming regeneration of metaphysics, of which there are so many signs at the moment, on the one hand, for emphatic insistence on the right, _e. g._, of physics and biology and psychology to be treated as purely empirical sciences, and as such freed from the last vestiges of any domination by metaphysical presuppositions and foregone conclusions, and on the other, for an equally salutary purgation of formal studies like logic and arithmetic from the taint of corruption by the irrelevant intrusion of considerations of empirical psychology.

We cannot too persistently bear in mind that there is, corresponding to the logical distinction between the analytic and the synthetic proposition, a deep and broad general difference between the wants of our nature ministered to by the formal and the applied sciences respectively. The formal sciences, incapable of adding anything to our detailed knowledge of the course of events, as we have seen, enlighten us solely as to the general laws of interconnection by which all conceivable systems of true assertions are permeated and bound together. In a different connection it would be interesting to develop further the reflection that the necessity of appealing to such formal principles in all reasoning about empirical matters of fact contains the explanation of the famous Platonic assertion that the "Idea of Good" or supreme principle of organization and order in the universe, is itself not an existent, but something eti epekeina tês ousias, "transcending even existence," and the very similar declaration of Hegel that the question whether "God"--in the sense of such a supreme principle--exists is frivolous, inasmuch as existence (_Dasein_) is a category entirely inadequate to express the Divine nature. For my present purpose it is enough to remark that the need to which the formal sciences minister is the demand for that purely speculative satisfaction which arises from insight into the order of interconnection between the various truths which compose the totality of true knowledge. Hence it seems a mistake to say, as some theorists have done, that were we born with a complete knowledge of the course of temporal sequences throughout the universe, and a faultless memory, we should have no need of logic or metaphysics, or in fact of inference. For even a mind already in possession of all true propositions concerning the course of events, would still lack one of the requisites for complete intellectual satisfaction unless it were also aware, not only of the individual truths, but of the order of their interdependence. What Aristotle said long ago with reference to a particular instance may be equally said universally of all our empirical knowledge; "even if we stood on the moon and saw the earth intercepting the light of the sun, we should still have to ask for the reason _why_." The purposes ministered to by the empirical sciences, on the other hand, always include some reference to the actual manipulation in advance by human agency of the stream of events. We study mechanics, for instance, not merely that we may perceive the interdependence of truths, but that we may learn how to maintain a system of bodies in equilibrium, or how to move masses in a given direction with a given momentum. Hence it is true of applied science, though untrue of science as a whole, that it would become useless if the whole past and future course of events were from the first familiar to us. And, incidentally it may be observed, it is for the same reason untrue of inference, though true of inductive inference, that it is essentially a passage from the known to the unknown.

In dealing with the relation of metaphysics to the formal sciences generally, the great difficulty which confronts us is that of determining exactly the boundaries which separate one from another. Among such pure sciences we have by universal admission to include at least two, pure formal logic and pure mathematics, as distinguished from the special applications of logic and mathematics to an empirical material. Whether we ought also to recognize ethics and æsthetics, in the sense of the general determination of the nature of the good and the beautiful, as non-empirical sciences, seems to be a more difficult question. It seems clear, for instance, that ethical discussions, such as bulk so largely in our contemporary literature, as to what is the right course of conduct under various conditions, are concerned throughout with an empirical material, namely, the existing peculiarities of human nature as we find it, and must therefore be regarded as capable only of an empirical and therefore problematic solution. Accordingly I was at one time myself tempted to regard ethics as a purely empirical science, and even published a lengthy treatise in defense of that point of view and in opposition to the whole Kantian conception of the possibility of a constructive _Metaphysik der Sitten_. It seems, however, possible to hold that in the question "What do we mean by good?" as distinguished from the question "What in particular is it right to do?" there is no more of a reference to the empirical facts of human psychology than in the question "What do we mean by truth?" and that there must therefore be a non-empirical answer to the problem. The same would of course hold equally true of the question "What _is_ beauty?" If there are, however, such a pure science of ethics and again of æsthetics, it must at least be allowed that for the most part these sciences are still undiscovered, and that the ethical and æsthetical results hitherto established are in the main of an empirical nature, and this must be my excuse for confining the remarks of the next two paragraphs to the two great pure sciences of which the general principles may be taken to be now in large measure known.