Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. Bertrand Russell
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is very flexible. It is so extensible, and thereby so comprehensive, that one accepts something of it as soon as one rejects pure mechanism. The theory we shall put forward in this book will therefore necessarily partake of finalism to a certain extent.”
M. Bergson's form of finalism depends upon his conception of life. Life, in his philosophy, is a continuous stream, in which all divisions are artificial and unreal. Separate things, beginnings and endings, are mere convenient fictions: there is only smooth, unbroken transition. The beliefs of to-day may count as true to-day, if they carry us along the stream; but to-morrow they will be false, and must be replaced by new beliefs to meet the new situation. All our thinking consists of convenient fictions, imaginary congealings of the stream: reality flows on in spite of all our fictions, and though it can be lived, it cannot be conceived in thought. Somehow, without explicit statement, the assurance is slipped in that the future, though we cannot foresee it, will be better than the past or the present: the reader is like the child who expects a sweet because it has been told to open its mouth and shut its eyes. Logic, mathematics, physics disappear in this philosophy, because they are too “static”; what is real is an impulse and movement towards a goal which, like the rainbow, recedes as we advance, and makes every place different when we reach it from what it appeared to be at a distance.
Now I do not propose at present to enter upon a technical examination of this philosophy. At present I wish to make only two criticisms of it—first, that its truth does not follow from what science has rendered probable concerning the facts of evolution, and secondly, that the motives and interests which inspire it are so exclusively practical, and the problems with which it deals are so special, that it can hardly be regarded as really touching any of the questions that to my mind constitute genuine philosophy.
(1) What biology has rendered probable is that the diverse species arose by adaptation from a less differentiated ancestry. This fact is in itself exceedingly interesting, but it is not the kind of fact from which philosophical consequences follow. Philosophy is general, and takes an impartial interest in all that exists. The changes suffered by minute portions of matter on the earth's surface are very important to us as active sentient beings; but to us as philosophers they have no greater interest than other changes in portions of matter elsewhere. And if the changes on the earth's surface during the last few millions of years appear to our present ethical notions to be in the nature of a progress, that gives no ground for believing that progress is a general law of the universe. Except under the influence of desire, no one would admit for a moment so crude a generalisation from such a tiny selection of facts. What does result, not specially from biology, but from all the sciences which deal with what exists, is that we cannot understand the world unless we can understand change and continuity. This is even more evident in physics than it is in biology. But the analysis of change and continuity is not a problem upon which either physics or biology throws any light: it is a problem of a new kind, belonging to a different kind of study. The question whether evolutionism offers a true or a false answer to this problem is not, therefore, a question to be solved by appeals to particular facts, such as biology and physics reveal. In assuming dogmatically a certain answer to this question, evolutionism ceases to be scientific, yet it is only in touching on this question that evolutionism reaches the subject-matter of philosophy. Evolutionism thus consists of two parts: one not philosophical, but only a hasty generalisation of the kind which the special sciences might hereafter confirm or confute; the other not scientific, but a mere unsupported dogma, belonging to philosophy by its subject-matter, but in no way deducible from the facts upon which evolution relies.
(2) The predominant interest of evolutionism is in the question of human destiny, or at least of the destiny of Life. It is more interested in morality and happiness than in knowledge for its own sake. It must be admitted that the same may be said of many other philosophies, and that a desire for the kind of knowledge which philosophy really can give is very rare. But if philosophy is to become scientific—and it is our object to discover how this can be achieved—it is necessary first and foremost that philosophers should acquire the disinterested intellectual curiosity which characterises the genuine man of science. Knowledge concerning the future—which is the kind of knowledge that must be sought if we are to know about human destiny—is possible within certain narrow limits. It is impossible to say how much the limits may be enlarged with the progress of science. But what is evident is that any proposition about the future belongs by its subject-matter to some particular science, and is to be ascertained, if at all, by the methods of that science. Philosophy is not a short cut to the same kind of results as those of the other sciences: if it is to be a genuine study, it must have a province of its own, and aim at results which the other sciences can neither prove nor disprove.
The consideration that philosophy, if there is such a study, must consist of propositions which could not occur in the other sciences, is one which has very far-reaching consequences. All the questions which have what is called a human interest—such, for example, as the question of a future life—belong, at least in theory, to special sciences, and are capable, at least in theory, of being decided by empirical evidence. Philosophers have too often, in the past, permitted themselves to pronounce on empirical questions, and found themselves, as a result, in disastrous conflict with well-attested facts. We must, therefore, renounce the hope that philosophy can promise satisfaction to our mundane desires. What it can do, when it is purified from all practical taint, is to help us to understand the general aspects of the world and the logical analysis of familiar but complex things. Through this achievement, by the suggestion of fruitful hypotheses, it may be indirectly useful in other sciences, notably mathematics, physics, and psychology. But a genuinely scientific philosophy cannot hope to appeal to any except those who have the wish to understand, to escape from intellectual bewilderment. It offers, in its own domain, the kind of satisfaction which the other sciences offer. But it does not offer, or attempt to offer, a solution of the problem of human destiny, or of the destiny of the universe.
Evolutionism, if what has been said is true, is to be regarded as a hasty generalisation from certain rather special facts, accompanied by a dogmatic rejection of all attempts at analysis, and inspired by interests which are practical rather than theoretical. In spite, therefore, of its appeal to detailed results in various sciences, it cannot be regarded as any more genuinely scientific than the classical tradition which it has replaced. How philosophy is to be rendered scientific, and what is the true subject-matter of philosophy, I shall try to show first by examples of certain achieved results, and then more generally. We will begin with the problem of the physical conceptions of space and time and matter, which, as we have seen, are challenged by the contentions of the evolutionists. That these conceptions stand in need of reconstruction will be admitted, and is indeed increasingly urged by physicists themselves. It will also be admitted that the reconstruction must take more account of change and the universal flux than is done in the older mechanics with its fundamental conception of an indestructible matter. But I do not think the reconstruction required is on Bergsonian lines, nor do I think that his rejection of logic can be anything but harmful. I shall not, however, adopt the method of explicit controversy, but rather the method of independent inquiry, starting from what, in a pre-philosophic stage, appear to be facts, and keeping always as close to these initial data as the requirements of consistency will permit.
Although explicit controversy is almost always fruitless in philosophy, owing to the fact that no two philosophers ever understand one another, yet it seems necessary to say something at the outset in justification of the scientific as against the mystical attitude. Metaphysics, from the first, has been developed by the union or the conflict of these two attitudes. Among the earliest Greek philosophers, the Ionians were more scientific and the Sicilians more mystical.[6] But among the latter, Pythagoras, for example, was in himself a curious mixture of the two tendencies: the scientific attitude led him to his proposition on right-angled triangles, while his mystic insight showed him that it is wicked to eat beans. Naturally enough, his followers divided into two sects, the lovers of right-angled triangles and the abhorrers of beans; but the former sect died out, leaving, however, a haunting flavour of mysticism over much Greek mathematical speculation, and in particular over Plato's views on mathematics. Plato, of course, embodies both the scientific and the mystical attitudes in a higher form than his predecessors, but the mystical attitude is distinctly the stronger of the two, and secures ultimate victory whenever the conflict is sharp.