Page:Philosophical Review Volume 31.djvu/270

258 rather because no refinement of scientific method, no exercise of the scientific imagination seems to bring us nearer to their solution. They stand apart, impervious to scientific treatment. This was discovered by scientists only after age-long efforts, when failure followed failure. From the day these troublesome questions began to be abandoned, the advance of science was rapid and sure. But even yet they are not altogether banished from the scientific field. Wherever they are considered, we have futile gropings and endless hair-splitting controversies. Even a cursory examination of these extra-scientific questions makes plain that they all refer to the nature of the real in experience. Lord Kelvin said in substance that after forty years of research in the physical laboratory, he knew as much about the nature of matter as he knew at first, which was nothing at all. Evidently he meant by this confession that for science a physical thing is merely a nexus of activities. He meant also that for himself as a man it was something more, though what that something was, science could not reveal. We are all in like position. We assume as a matter of course the reality in experience, and then read it into our scientific formulæ. That this is legitimate, no one questions. But the significant fact is that science itself does not provide for any such reality. It is assumed because we as human beings cannot do without it. Man as man wants to know what this reality is which constitutes his world, and what his own status is as part of that world. Philosophy is the ever-renewed attempt to satisfy this human need. We have here the fundamental difference between science and philosophy. The one holds to the study of processes, the other to the study of reality as such.

At this point the objection is occasionally urged that since reality cannot be experienced, it cannot be known. But this is a misunderstanding arising from a subtle scientific prejudice. Reality is just that which can be experienced, though only its activities can be observed and described. Now it is well known that science as description begins in abstractions, and with every step in advance becomes more abstract. The whole movement is toward the logical goal of a world-system of activities. Reality