Page:Philosophical Review Volume 31.djvu/271

No. 3.] is never found in a scientific system, except that the system as a mental construct is real. Whatever of reality science carries with it to give meaning to its formulæ, is extra-scientific baggage to be got rid of whenever science wants to be thoroughgoing. This evident fact needs no elaboration, and can be called in question only by those who have not faced the essential scientific problem, or the limitations of the scientific point of view. Such conceptions as matter, force, spirit, are not scientific. We can observe and analyze activities, processes, changes, but never the reality that acts. By this I mean that the thing itself is apprehended by an act that is quite distinct from mere observation. If we were but onlookers, we should never suspect that any external reality existed. Hence, as has been intimated, the sciences as observational must culminate in a conception of the world as pure process. Whatever is supposed to exist is resolved into a succession of changes, or rather into a continuous change. Thus the scientific view when carried to its logical outcome reveals its essential inadequacy; it gives us a world-process in which nothing remains long enough to proceed. I know this is ancient history, but it is true nevertheless. On a scientific basis we cannot say even as much as Heraclitus, that the law of change abides. Hence we must acknowledge the significance of the extra-scientific question, What is reality? What is the nature of that which proceeds? The question is primarily theoretical, just as the scientific interest is primarily practical. The two aims stand over against each other in permanent and manifest contrast. To ignore this means confusion. There has never been a time when the distinction did not need to be emphasized. The history of the sciences records continuous controversy brought on and sustained by the admixture of crude philosophical notions, while much of the philosophy of the past, not to mention present systems, has consisted largely of premature science.

But anyone familiar with the abortive efforts to reach the real, will be inclined to press the sceptical question, Can the philosophical quest ever attain fruition? Can the human mind know reality as it is? This question as it stands has almost the force of an argument, because it is generally interpreted by the sceptic