Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/78

70 of philosophy. More and more the search for reality behind appearance would seem like a monkish dream.

This might be a great catastrophe for human knowledge and experience, but nature permits catastrophes.

And if it should come to pass? Well,— we should then have science and our natural view of the world.

To put it as briefly as possible, science is interested in contents, and aims at getting more content. The existential predicate adds nothing to the definable content, therefore science has no interest in the existential predicate. By what interest then is the existential predicate demanded? Not by an interest in contents that are in any way statable, therefore by an interest in contents that are unutterable. For it can not be denied that the predicate of existence does enrich the total content, but it does so in unutterable ways. And the interest in the unutterable is a purely emotional interest.

The relation between science and metaphysics as above described is strikingly like that situation in the Middle Ages which brought forth the doctrine of the twofold truth. This doctrine was first stated in the interest of religion, but its effect was to liberate scientific speculation, and to protect religion so well that theology occupied, more and more, a position of dignified but somewhat lonesome aloofness. If now we are told that a proposition can be true in science and false in metaphysics, and vice versa, one really can not be blamed for detecting in the 'fringe' a feeling of prophecy.