Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/91

Rh METAPHYSIC 81 futility of making one finite thing the explanation of all other finite things, tried to find that explanation in the very notion of unity or being itself. We need not underestimate the speculative value of such bold attempts to sum up all the variety of the world in one idea, but it is obvious that they rather give a name to the problem than solve it, or that they put the very consciousness of the problem in place of the solution of it. Science is possible only if we can rise from the particular to the universal, from a subjective view of things as they immediately present themselves to us in perception to an objective determination of them through laws and principles which have no special relation to any particular set of events or to any one individual subject. But this is only one aspect of the matter. To advance from a conception of the world in ordine ad individuum to one in ordine ad universum, and so to discount and eliminate what is merely subjective and accidental in our first consciousness of the world, is the beginning of knowledge. But little is gained unless the universal, which we reach through the negation of the particulars, is more than their mere negation ; unless it is a law or principle by means of which we can explain the particulars. Now the defect of early philosophy was that its universal was &quot; the one beyond the many,&quot; not the &quot; one in the many,&quot; in other words, that it was not a law or principle by which the particulars subsumed under it could be explained, but simply the abstraction of an element common to them. But the process of knowledge is a process that involves both analysis and synthesis, negation and reaffirmation of the particulars with which we start. If we exaggerate the former aspect of it, we enter upon the via negativa of the mystics, the way of pure abstraction and negation, which would open the mind to the ideal reality of things simply by shutting it to all the perceptions of sensible phenomena. And, if we follow out this method to its legitimate result, we must treat the highest abstraction, the abstraction of Being, as if it were the sum of all reality, and the Neo-Platonic ecstasy in which all distinction, even the distinction of subject and object, is lost as the only attitude of mind in which truth can be apprehended. In the philosophy of the Socratic school we find the first attempt at a systematic as opposed to an abstract theory the first attempt to bring together the one and the many, and so to determine the former that it should throw light upon the latter. Yet even in Plato the tendency to oppose the universal to the particular is stronger than the tendency to relate them to each other, and in some of his dialogues, as, e.g. in the Phxdo, we find a near approach to that identification of the process of knowledge with abstraction which is the characteristic of mysticism. Aristotle, therefore, had some ground for taking the Platonic principle that &quot; the real is the universal &quot; in a sense which excludes the reality of the individual. Yet, though he detected Plato s error in opposing the universal to the particular, and though, at the same time, he did not entirely lose sight of the truth which Plato had exagger ated, that the particular is intelligible only through the universal, Aristotle was not able to escape the influence of that dualism which had marred the philosophy of his predecessor. Hence the effect of his protest against a philosophy of abstraction was partly neutralized by his separation between the divine Being as pure form and nature as the unity of form and matter, and again by his separation of the pure reason which apprehends the forms of things from the perceptions of sense which deal with forms realized in matter. And after Aristotle s time the tendency of philosophy was more and more to withdraw from contact with experience. The Neo-Platonic philo sophy, and the Christian theology which was so strongly influenced by it, contained, indeed, an idea of the recon ciliation of God and nature, and hence of form and matter, which must ultimately be fatal to dualism, and therefore to the method of mere abstraction. But the explicit meaning of the philosophy of the Middle Ages was still dualistic, and the mode in which the Aristotelian formulas were wrought into the substance of Christian doctrine by the scholastics tended more and more to conceal that idea of the unity of opposites which was involved in Christianity. Hence mediaeval realism presented, in its most one-sided form, the doctrine that &quot; the real is the universal,&quot; meaning by the universal nothing more than the abstract. And, as a natural consequence, the modern insurrection of the scientific spirit against scholasticism took its start from an equally bald and one-sided assertion of the opposite principle, that &quot;the real is the individual,&quot; meaning by that the individual of immediate perception. If Platonism had dwelt too exclusively on one aspect of the process of knowledge, viz., that it seeks to rise above the particular, the sensible, the subjective, to the universal, the intelligible, the objective, as if in the latter alone were reality to be found, modern men of science learnt from their first nominalistic teachers to regard the universal as nothing more than an abbreviated expression for the particulars, and science itself as a mere generalization of the facts of sensible perception. But this view of scientific knowledge, as a mere reaffirma tion of what is immediately given in sense, is as imperfect as the opposite theory, which reduces it to the mere negation of what is so given. An ideal world utterly and entirely divorced from the phenomenal, and an ideal world which is simply a repetition of the phenomenal, are equally meaningless. The processes of science have both a negative and a positive side ; they involve a nega tion of the particular as it is immediately presented in sense, but only with a view to its being reaffirmed with a new determination through the universal. The fact as it is first presented to us is not the fact as it is ; for, though it is from the fact as given that we rise to the knowledge of the law, it is the law that first enables us to understand what the fact really means. Our first consciousness cf things is thus, not an immovable foundation upon which science may build, but rather a hypothetical and self -con tradictory starting-point of investigation, which becomes changed and transformed as we advance. The nominalism of scientific men in modern times is due to two special causes, one of which has already been mentioned. It is partly due to the traditions of a time when mediaeval realism was the great enemy of science. The Baconian protest against the &quot; anticipation of nature &quot; was a relative truth when it was urged against a class of writers who supposed that true theories could be attained without regard to facts ; the Baconian assertion of the necessity of attending to axiomata media was the necessary correction of the tendencies of mystics, who supposed that philosophy could attain its end by grasping at once at absolute unity, and contented themselves, therefore, with a unity which did nothing to explain the differences. But, when the former was turned into the dogmatic assertion that the mind is, or ought to be, passive in the process of knowledge, as having in itself no principle for the explanation of things, and when the latter was turned into the dogmatic assertion that science can only proceed from part to part and never from the whole to the parts, these relative truths became a source of error. And this error was confirmed and increased by the mistaken views of those who first tried to correct it. For these, admitting that scientific truth is entirely derived from external experience, only ventured to assert the existence of a priori knowledge alongside of, and in addition to, that which is a posteriori. In other words, they sought in inner experience a basis for XVI ir