While physics has been making matter less material, psychology has been making mind less mental. We had occasion in a former chapter to compare the association of ideas with the conditioned reflex. The latter, which has replaced the former, is obviously much more physiological. (This is only one illustration; I do not wish to exaggerate the scope of the conditioned reflex.) Thus from both ends physics and psychology have been approaching each other, and making more possible the doctrine of “neutral monism” suggested by William James’s criticism of “consciousness.” The distinction of mind and matter came into philosophy from religion, although, for a long time, it seemed to have valid grounds. I think that both mind and matter are merely convenient ways of grouping events. Some single events, I should admit, belong only to material groups, but others belong to both kinds of groups, and are therefore at once mental and material. This doctrine effects a great simplification in our picture of the structure of the world.
Modern physics and physiology throw a new light upon the ancient problem of perception. If there is to be anything that can be called “perception,” it must be in some degree an effect of the object perceived, and it must more or less resemble the object if it is to be a source of knowledge of the object. The first requisite can only be fulfilled if there are causal chains which are, to a greater or less extent, independent of the rest of the world. According to physics, this is the case. Light-waves travel from the sun to the earth, and in doing so obey their own laws. This is only roughly true. Einstein has shown that light-rays are affected by gravitation. When they reach our atmosphere, they suffer refraction, and some are more scattered than others. When they reach a human eye, all sorts of things happen which would not happen elsewhere, ending up with what we call “seeing the
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sun.” But although the sun of our visual experience is very different from the sun of the astronomer, it is still a source of knowledge as to the latter, because “seeing the sun” differs from “seeing the moon” in ways that are causally connected with the difference between the astronomer’s sun and the astronomer’s moon. What we can know of physical objects in this way, however, is only certain abstract properties of structure. We can know that the sun is round in a sense, though not quite the sense in which what we see is round; but we have no reason to suppose that it is bright or warm, because physics can account for its seeming so without supposing that it is so. Our knowledge of the physical world, therefore, is only abstract and mathematical.
Modern analytical empiricism, of which I have been giving an outline, differs from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume by its incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy. It has the advantage, as compared with the philosophies of the systembuilders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead of having to invent at one stroke a block theory of the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect, resemble those of science. I have no doubt that, in so far as philosophical knowledge is possible, it is by such methods that it must be sought; I have also no doubt that, by these methods, many ancient problems are completely soluble.
There remains, however, a vast field, traditionally included in philosophy, where scientific methods are inadequate. This field includes ultimate questions of value; science alone, for example, cannot prove that it is bad to enjoy the infliction of cruelty. Whatever can be known, can be known by means of science; but things which are legitimately matters of feeling lie outside its province.
Philosophy, throughout its history, has consisted of two parts inharmoniously blended: on the one hand a theory as to the nature of the world, on the other an ethical or political doctrine as to the best way of living. The failure to separate these two with sufficient clarity has been a source of much confused thinking. Philosophers, from Plato to William James, have allowed their opinions as to the constitution of the universe to be influenced by the desire for edification: knowing, as they supposed, what beliefs would make men virtuous,
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they have invented arguments, often very sophistical, to prove that these beliefs are true. For my part I reprobate this kind of bias, both on moral and on intellectual grounds. Morally, a philosopher who uses his professional competence for anything except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery. And when he assumes, in advance of inquiry, that certain beliefs, whether true or false, are such as to promote good behaviour, he is so limiting the scope of philosophical speculation as to make philosophy trivial; the true philosopher is prepared to examine all preconceptions. When any limits are placed, consciously or unconsciously, upon the pursuit of truth, philosophy becomes paralysed by fear, and the ground is prepared for a government censorship punishing those who utter “dangerous thoughts”–in fact, the philosopher has already placed such a censorship over his own investigations.
Intellectually, the effect of mistaken moral considerations upon philosophy has been to impede progress to an extraordinary extent. I do not myself believe that philosophy can either prove or disprove the truth of religious dogmas, but ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce “proofs” of immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors–SaintThomas rejected Saint Anselm’s proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes’–but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deep-seated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions.
All this is rejected by the philosophers who make logical analysis the main business of philosophy. They confess frankly that the human intellect is unable to find conclusive answers to many questions of profound importance to mankind, but they refuse to believe that there is some “higher” way of knowing, by which we can discover truths hidden from science and the intellect. For this renunciation they have been rewarded by the discovery that many questions, formerly obscured by the fog of metaphysics, can be answered with precision, and by objective methods which introduce nothing of the philosopher’s temperament except the desire to understand. Take such questions as: What is number? What are space and time? What is mind, and what is matter? I do not say that we can here and now give definitive answers to all these ancient questions, but I do say that
a method has been discovered by which, as in science, we can make successive approximations to the truth, in which each new stage results from an improvement, not a rejection, of what has gone before.
In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings. To have insisted upon the introduction of this virtue into philosophy, and to have invented a powerful method by which it can be rendered fruitful, are the chief merits of the philosophical school of which I am a member. The habit of careful veracity acquired in the practice of this philosophical method can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity, producing, wherever it exists, a lessening of fanaticism with an increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual understanding. In abandoning a part of its dogmatic pretensions, philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of life.
Aaron, first Jewish high priest (fl. 1200? B.C.), 440
Abbasid dynasty, 421 , 422
Abdera, 64 , 76
Abdon, judge in Israel, 361
Abel, 360 , 440
Abélard, Pierre, French theologian and philosopher ( 1079-1142), 432 *, 436 -440
Aberdeen, 748
Abraham, Jewish patriarch, 280 , 328 , 440
Achitophel. See Shaftesbury
Absolute, 731 -735, 742 , 794 , 820
absolute equality, 139 , 140
absolute space, 70 , 71
absolutist development, 718
abstract knowledge of physical world, 834
abstract concept of number, 802
abstract ideas, 802 , 803
Abu Yaqub Yusuf. See Yaqub Yusuf, Abu
abundance, 775
Abyssinia, 318 , 369
Academicians, Academics, 350 , 361 , 440
Academy of Athens, 61 , 160 , 209 , 235 , 236 , 238 , 253 , 259 , 277
acceleration, 531 , 532 , 535 , 539 , 540
Achaeans, 7 , 8
Achaia, 343
Achilles and the Tortoise, 806
acquired characteristics, 726
Acragas, 53 , 56 , 305
Acropolis, 59
action, 200 , 792 , 797 -800, 806 , 810
activist point of view, 784
Acts, 324 ; cited, 87 *; quoted, 403
actuality, 167 , 170 , 678
Adam, 391 , 458 , 556 , 571 , 589 , 593 ; and St. Animusfine, 359 , 360 ,
365 ; kings as heirs of, 618 , 619 , 621
adaptation, 792
Addresses to the German Nation (Fichte), 718
Adeimantus, brother of Plato, 117 , 122
Adelhard (or Athelhard) of Bath, English traveller
