Page:Philosophical Review Volume 31.djvu/269



AS philosophy, as over against science, a permanent place in our intellectual life, a unique field all its own? This is the question I will try to answer. By the nature of the question I shall be led to contrast the two rather than to show their vital interrelations. It is needful at the outset to agree upon a delimitation of science. Science may claim exclusive rights in the study of nature's activities. It is at home wherever any form of experience, internal or external, can become an object of investigation. At first this may seem to cover the whole field of the knowable. It certainly means that every attainment in philosophy becomes forthwith a theme for scientific treatment. Apparently then philosophy is destined to ever-increasing poverty. History seems to support this conclusion. As the original matrix of the sciences, philosophy has suffered successive diremptions, till it is now looked upon, at least by the typically scientific mind, as merely the custodian of left-over problems. If such were the case, one might imagine the sciences drawing from philosophy until all its accredited truth was appropriated. Philosophy would then become an intellectual refugee, free to roam at will "in the wild and tangled forest" of life's inscrutable mysteries, and indulge without restraint in the "unearthly ballet of bloodless categories," but unable to maintain its right to be taken seriously. Science, however, in its onward sweep, has discovered that it is not all-conquering. At every step questions emerge that science has no way of handling. With increasing decisiveness the scientist puts these questions aside as out of his range. The presumption in the minds of many is that these questions, if extra-scientific, are strictly insoluble. Yet they are practically unavoidable. Far from being of indifferent interest, they carry with them the major values of life. To let them alone we must apparently dehumanize ourselves. Why then are they considered extra-scientific? Not merely because they are yet unsolved;