Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/146

130, cannot afford to indulge itself in any such epistemological scepticism, or extreme of agnosticism, as shall rob the particular sciences of all power to make contributions to a metaphysics that has ontological validity. On the contrary, philosophy must study diligently, and learn with docility, going daily to school to the particular sciences. If necessary, it must often take the metaphysical speculations of the leaders of scientific development somewhat more seriously to heart than the same speculations are taken by the leaders themselves.

But there is another truth about science which philosophy, if it would perform its function of reconciliation most effectively, must steadfastly hold in mind. And this truth is one which it is called upon to teach to the leaders of scientific development rather than to learn from them. Science, in its more comprehensive and profound signification, is itself an ideal affair. It is founded upon, and largely penetrated through and through with, the ideals of human reason. These ideals are not wholly of the sort that can be isolated from the æsthetical, ethical, and religious sentiments and conceptions of the race. The scientific ideals are chiefly identical with the æsthetical ideals; largely the same as the ethical ideals; and much more than is customarily suspected, closely akin to the ideals of religion. It is largely as having value for the satisfaction of ideal demands that the fundamental conceptions and supreme generalizations of the particular sciences gain the acceptance of the human intellect. It is not simply when man enters a picture galley or the opera house that his æsthetical nature makes itself felt upon the judgments which he frames. It is not only when he goes to church that the human being clothes himself with a moral and religious nature. Every act of preference, not to say deference, given to the orderly, the sublime, the true, the good, or to that which speaks of beauty, justness, and law, over the chaotic, the ugly, the false, the base and mean, is a witness to the effectual working of the idealizing tendency in man. All the superior satisfactions afforded by objects, or systems of objects, discovered or conceived of as having these ideal qualifications, bear united testimony to the energy with which sentiments similar to those