Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/76

68 Francis. Even Kant, who nearly always displays the ideal philosophical temper, lets one see that his course is determined by his valuation of moral character. Fichte is evidently, in all his work, responding to a moral enthusiasm, defining reality so as to adapt it to emotional needs.

Not all metaphysicians, however, have been determined in their philosophy by religious cravings. Many an imagination loves to play with cosmic themes, and what it produces is a work of art.

Metaphysics is, like all knowledge laboriously attained, the response which has been made to demands for cognitive satisfaction. The demand is, of course, the expression of a temperament and may show a religious or an esthetic character. It may show, too, what we are obliged to call the purely intellectual character, where the cognitive satisfaction which is sought is a deli«;lit in knowing, in rt'lating ideas, in building up an ideal system of thought which charms by its order and completeness. A superb example of this type is Aristotle.

I ask above for the motives which makes metaphysics insist upon the existential judgment, and I have indicated certain emotional needs which demand this satisfaction. Actually, however, the existential judgment is so characteristic of metaphysics because until very recently it was equally characteristic of science, and the motives which are driving it out of science have not yet made themselves felt in philosophy. This critical attitude in science has not yet become very general, but we can not doubt that it will become rapidly authoritative. A point of view which leaves to science full scope to carry on its tasks, and defines those tasks in such a way as to eliminate metaphysics, or at least to reduce the metaphysical presuppositions to a minimum, is sure to be most welcome. And this point of view, when it comes to be regarded as the only point of view for science, when the definition of the goal of science as the knowledge of the unchanging original causes of phenomena comes to be looked back upon as something quite antiquated and outgrown, may have important consequences for metaphysics.

Metaphysics, as we saw, is the response to interests of rather different types. It undertakes to satisfy certain emotional needs of a religious or semireligious character, and it ministers to the purely intellectual and esthetic delight in noble ideal constructions. To the former of these two classes of interest, the existential judgment must always be indispensable. It is not evident why it should be indispensable to the latter. The latter type of mind is ever admitted to be the more scientific of the two. And supposing that the concepts of science, the atom, the molecule, the ether, etc., are recognized and claimed as nothing but conceptual instruments for extending our acquaintance with nature, and the idea of the atom or of the ether as an