Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy Part 12

What has been said on philosophical method in the foregoing lectures has been rather by means of ill.u.s.trations in particular cases than by means of general precepts. Nothing of any value can be said on method except through examples; but now, at the end of our course, we may collect certain general maxims which may possibly be a help in acquiring a philosophical habit of mind and a guide in looking for solutions of philosophic problems.

Philosophy does not become scientific by making use of other sciences, in the kind of way in which (_e.g._) Herbert Spencer does. Philosophy aims at what is _general_, and the special sciences, however they may _suggest_ large generalisations, cannot make them certain. And a hasty generalisation, such as Spencer's generalisation of evolution, is none the less hasty because what is generalised is the latest scientific theory. Philosophy is a study apart from the other sciences: its results cannot be established by the other sciences, and conversely must not be such as some other science might conceivably contradict. Prophecies as to the future of the universe, for example, are not the business of philosophy; whether the universe is progressive, retrograde, or stationary, it is not for the philosopher to say.

In order to become a scientific philosopher, a certain peculiar mental discipline is required. There must be present, first of all, the desire to know philosophical truth, and this desire must be sufficiently strong to survive through years when there seems no hope of its finding any satisfaction. The desire to know philosophical truth is very rare--in its purity, it is not often found even among philosophers. It is obscured sometimes--particularly after long periods of fruitless search--by the desire to _think_ we know. Some plausible opinion presents itself, and by turning our attention away from the objections to it, or merely by not making great efforts to find objections to it, we may obtain the comfort of believing it, although, if we had resisted the wish for comfort, we should have come to see that the opinion was false. Again the desire for unadulterated truth is often obscured, in professional philosophers, by love of system: the one little fact which will not come inside the philosopher's edifice has to be pushed and tortured until it seems to consent. Yet the one little fact is more likely to be important for the future than the system with which it is inconsistent. Pythagoras invented a system which fitted admirably with all the facts he knew, except the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square and the side; this one little fact stood out, and remained a fact even after Hippasos of Metapontion was drowned for revealing it. To us, the discovery of this fact is the chief claim of Pythagoras to immortality, while his system has become a matter of merely historical curiosity.[57] Love of system, therefore, and the system-maker's vanity which becomes a.s.sociated with it, are among the snares that the student of philosophy must guard against.

[57] The above remarks, for purposes of ill.u.s.tration, adopt one of several possible opinions on each of several disputed points.

The desire to establish this or that result, or generally to discover evidence for agreeable results, of whatever kind, has of course been the chief obstacle to honest philosophising. So strangely perverted do men become by unrecognised pa.s.sions, that a determination in advance to arrive at this or that conclusion is generally regarded as a mark of virtue, and those whose studies lead to an opposite conclusion are thought to be wicked. No doubt it is commoner to wish to arrive at an agreeable result than to wish to arrive at a true result. But only those in whom the desire to arrive at a _true_ result is paramount can hope to serve any good purpose by the study of philosophy.

But even when the desire to know exists in the requisite strength, the mental vision by which abstract truth is recognised is hard to distinguish from vivid imaginability and consonance with mental habits.

It is necessary to practise methodological doubt, like Descartes, in order to loosen the hold of mental habits; and it is necessary to cultivate logical imagination, in order to have a number of hypotheses at command, and not to be the slave of the one which common sense has rendered easy to imagine. These two processes, of doubting the familiar and imagining the unfamiliar, are correlative, and form the chief part of the mental training required for a philosopher.

The nave beliefs which we find in ourselves when we first begin the process of philosophic reflection may turn out, in the end, to be almost all capable of a true interpretation; but they ought all, before being admitted into philosophy, to undergo the ordeal of sceptical criticism.

Until they have gone through this ordeal, they are mere blind habits, ways of behaving rather than intellectual convictions. And although it may be that a majority will pa.s.s the test, we may be pretty sure that some will not, and that a serious readjustment of our outlook ought to result. In order to break the dominion of habit, we must do our best to doubt the senses, reason, morals, everything in short. In some directions, doubt will be found possible; in others, it will be checked by that direct vision of abstract truth upon which the possibility of philosophical knowledge depends.

At the same time, and as an essential aid to the direct perception of the truth, it is necessary to acquire fertility in imagining abstract hypotheses. This is, I think, what has most of all been lacking hitherto in philosophy. So meagre was the logical apparatus that all the hypotheses philosophers could imagine were found to be inconsistent with the facts. Too often this state of things led to the adoption of heroic measures, such as a wholesale denial of the facts, when an imagination better stocked with logical tools would have found a key to unlock the mystery. It is in this way that the study of logic becomes the central study in philosophy: it gives the method of research in philosophy, just as mathematics gives the method in physics. And as physics, which, from Plato to the Renaissance, was as unprogressive, dim, and superst.i.tious as philosophy, became a science through Galileo's fresh observation of facts and subsequent mathematical manipulation, so philosophy, in our own day, is becoming scientific through the simultaneous acquisition of new facts and logical methods.

In spite, however, of the new possibility of progress in philosophy, the first effect, as in the case of physics, is to diminish very greatly the extent of what is thought to be known. Before Galileo, people believed themselves possessed of immense knowledge on all the most interesting questions in physics. He established certain facts as to the way in which bodies fall, not very interesting on their own account, but of quite immeasurable interest as examples of real knowledge and of a new method whose future fruitfulness he himself divined. But his few facts sufficed to destroy the whole vast system of supposed knowledge handed down from Aristotle, as even the palest morning sun suffices to extinguish the stars. So in philosophy: though some have believed one system, and others another, almost all have been of opinion that a great deal was known; but all this supposed knowledge in the traditional systems must be swept away, and a new beginning must be made, which we shall esteem fortunate indeed if it can attain results comparable to Galileo's law of falling bodies.

By the practice of methodological doubt, if it is genuine and prolonged, a certain humility as to our knowledge is induced: we become glad to know _anything_ in philosophy, however seemingly trivial. Philosophy has suffered from the lack of this kind of modesty. It has made the mistake of attacking the interesting problems at once, instead of proceeding patiently and slowly, acc.u.mulating whatever solid knowledge was obtainable, and trusting the great problems to the future. Men of science are not ashamed of what is intrinsically trivial, if its consequences are likely to be important; the _immediate_ outcome of an experiment is hardly ever interesting on its own account. So in philosophy, it is often desirable to expend time and care on matters which, judged alone, might seem frivolous, for it is often only through the consideration of such matters that the greater problems can be approached.

When our problem has been selected, and the necessary mental discipline has been acquired, the method to be pursued is fairly uniform. The big problems which provoke philosophical inquiry are found, on examination, to be complex, and to depend upon a number of component problems, usually more abstract than those of which they are the components. It will generally be found that all our initial data, all the facts that we seem to know to begin with, suffer from vagueness, confusion, and complexity. Current philosophical ideas share these defects; it is therefore necessary to create an apparatus of precise conceptions as general and as free from complexity as possible, before the data can be a.n.a.lysed into the kind of premisses which philosophy aims at discovering. In this process of a.n.a.lysis, the source of difficulty is tracked further and further back, growing at each stage more abstract, more refined, more difficult to apprehend. Usually it will be found that a number of these extraordinarily abstract questions underlie any one of the big obvious problems. When everything has been done that can be done by method, a stage is reached where only direct philosophic vision can carry matters further. Here only genius will avail. What is wanted, as a rule, is some new effort of logical imagination, some glimpse of a possibility never conceived before, and then the direct perception that this possibility is realised in the case in question. Failure to think of the right possibility leaves insoluble difficulties, balanced arguments pro and con, utter bewilderment and despair. But the right possibility, as a rule, when once conceived, justifies itself swiftly by its astonis.h.i.+ng power of absorbing apparently conflicting facts. From this point onward, the work of the philosopher is synthetic and comparatively easy; it is in the very last stage of the a.n.a.lysis that the real difficulty consists.

Of the prospect of progress in philosophy, it would be rash to speak with confidence. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, perhaps most of those which have interested a wider circle than that of technical students, do not appear to be soluble by scientific methods.

Just as astronomy lost much of its human interest when it ceased to be astrology, so philosophy must lose in attractiveness as it grows less prodigal of promises. But to the large and still growing body of men engaged in the pursuit of science--men who hitherto, not without justification, have turned aside from philosophy with a certain contempt--the new method, successful already in such time-honoured problems as number, infinity, continuity, s.p.a.ce and time, should make an appeal which the older methods have wholly failed to make. Physics, with its principle of relativity and its revolutionary investigations into the nature of matter, is feeling the need for that kind of novelty in fundamental hypotheses which scientific philosophy aims at facilitating.

The one and only condition, I believe, which is necessary in order to secure for philosophy in the near future an achievement surpa.s.sing all that has. .h.i.therto been accomplished by philosophers, is the creation of a school of men with scientific training and philosophical interests, unhampered by the traditions of the past, and not misled by the literary methods of those who copy the ancients in all except their merits.