Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/301

Rh matter and its constitution, which have to be discussed by a science different from natural science as such; they have treated natural science as a thing of relative, not of self-dependent and absolute significance. Descartes, Leibnitz, Wolff, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Lotze, have accounts to give of nature, which no mere empiricist, no mere mathematician, would as such think to give. Kant, in the celebrated preface to his Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science, though treating natural science proper as something far above what, perhaps, is commonly dignified by the name of natural science, viz. empirical description and characterization of natural objects and processes, and affirming that a science is a natural science proper, only so far as it is ruled by mathematical principles, declares that natural science proper presupposes a metaphysics of nature (this presupposing in turn a higher metaphysics). Schelling, building upon a Kantian basis, distinguishes from empirical natural science speculative physics founded upon the a priori notion of nature as pure productivity. Hegel put forth a "philosophy of nature" which conceived nature, not from the point of view of sense or even of the mathematical understanding merely, but from that of the pure idea or self-determining notion or thought. Lotze separates sharply cosmology, or the speculative account of the foundation of physical existence, and natural history, or the mere description of physical phenomena. Even certain English positivists (?) as Mill, Lewes, Huxley, assert that natural science ultimately lands us in metaphysics. The history of modern thought indicates (in fact, demonstrates) the existence of a real distinction to be made between natural science and what must be called the philosophy of nature.

What is the distinction in question? It may be said, in the first place, that the body of natural sciences requires to be co-ordinated — not of course in the sense of being reduced to a common level, but of being brought together in their natural relations of interdependence — and that this "co-ordination" is the work of, or is itself, the philosophy of nature. The philosophy of nature, if this be its sole province, is but generalized natural science, as Spencer, for example, maintains; it is the broadest,