Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/131

115 arrogate to itself some superior point of view, which, whether reached by the flights of speculative reason or by the slow climbing of inductive processes, shall be able to escape the necessity of reckoning with the conclusions and the value-judgments of all of these sciences.

And what is true of the conceptions which aim to define the content of the particular sciences is also true of all the conceptions which form essential factors in the content of the same sciences. As to precisely what mathematics is, for example, there is no complete agreement. The value of the parallel axiom, or postulate, upon which the whole system of Euclidean geometry reposed securely and peacefully for centuries, and its validity for space relations objectively considered, are no longer clear and self-evident matters. Physics and chemistry cannot delimit their separate spheres so as to avoid either coming into conflict, or else to some mutual agreement, over wide expanses of territory common to them both. The very word 'psycho-physics' shows how impossible it has become either to consider all physical phenomena without reference to conceptions that have their primary meanings, references, and values in the psychical sphere, or to explain psychical occurrences without reference to phenomena that plainly have, in themselves considered, all the characteristic marks of the physical. Indeed, the mathematical and physico-chemical sciences generally are making most heroic efforts to clear up the obscurity of their fundamental conceptions, and thus to attain some sort of harmony amongst themselves which shall worthily exhibit both their own reasonable self-respect and their equally reasonable respect for one another. And there are also plain and welcome signs that philosophy and the particular sciences have begun to court each other. They seem ready to consider, in a spirit of reciprocal appreciation and of conciliation, how they may coöperate to the advancement of the better and higher life of humanity.

As to the part which philosophy is destined to play in carrying out so worthy an endeavor, it does not seem to me necessary that we should be able to establish a conception of philosophy which shall have a precision such as, indeed, none of the positive