Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/586

574 inner life and acts toward him in the spirit of fair play. Second, in his book War and Insurance, the same key-note is struck as regards international relations. Royce could not help seeing in Germany the ruthless egotist who is the foe of the very foundation principle of morality, the harmony of interests and wills. To him, therefore, Germany appeared as the opponent, not only of modern civilization, but of the spirit of America.

The controversy over the relative place of science and the humanities in a scheme of education is the reflection of a fundamental opposition, deep-rooted in western civilization, arising from the apparent conflict between the aims and interests of human life and the ruthlessly objective course of nature. Science, from one point of view, is the consummate achievement of man: it places him at the crown of nature, and, paradoxically enough, this place seems to have been won by applying the supposition that nature is independent, outside human interests, coldly indifferent, if not opposed, to man's ideals. But the conflict rests on a misconception of the meaning of nature and of the procedure of science. The scientist wrongly designates as nature the object or objects of his theoretic endeavors, as something independent of human desires and interests, before which man must bow down in submission. He seeks to discover its laws in their independent character, neglecting the fact that, although 'nature' is outside man spatially, man himself is part of nature, and that, although man must discover nature's laws, objective nature is not opposed or indifferent to human nature. Again, the scientist conceives his own method as a sort of process of holding his mind open to let the laws of nature shine in upon it, as if his mind were a still mirror reflecting nature's processes. But in reality the mind in scientific investigation is active, alive; it fights nature, winning it over by force, if necessary, into harmony with thought. In the first stages of scientific procedure, distinctions and definitions are made simply to facilitate and make perfect our intellectual constructions; our thought and its aims determine our endeavors from first to last. Also, in the results of science, in the laws it discovers and in the conceptions it develops, the operation of the human intellect is evident. Quantity, force, mass, and weight are the human ways in which man thinks the facts presented to him. Nature does not give him his knowledge, but it is his own construction, a form of human energy, depending, not on the necessity of things, but on the necessity of thought, in which hypotheses and experiments are the necessary factors. When its results are false, science does not hesitate to attribute the error to the human mind; why, then, should it not say the same thing about its truth? Mathematics is no exception to this general rule of all science; that its principles are universally accepted only shows how completely they depend on the very structure of the human mind. When we pass on to the more concrete sciences, like biology, we are only the more convinced that science is through and through