Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/373

Rh one among the great paradoxes of history. Ever fond of revenges, the Time-spirit becomes supremely ironical here.

Post-Reformation Europe accomplished much for science and philosophy. In both fields, investigation followed clearly marked lines, but the conclusions reached were of such a nature that they dovetailed easily. For science meant the mathematico-physical sciences, specifically, mathematics, astronomy and 'molar' physics. Philosophy meant, on the continent, the metaphysics of dualism, starting from the question, How can matter and mind, extension and thought, as they were then termed, be related so as to form a consistent whole; in Britain, individualistic psychology, concentrated on the problem. How do I get knowledge, and, when obtained, what is it? In a word, the sciences and philosophy attacked the same universe—the universe as conceived by Newton. Philosophy did not aspire to a higher knowledge than that reached by science, but confined its inquiries to some aspects of the world which had been left untouched by mathematics and physics. Thus both arrived at consonant conclusions. Harvey, for example, did not suggest that Bacon wrote on scientific questions like a philosopher, as he would assuredly have done had they lived forty years ago; he said merely, the Lord Chancellor writes like a Lord Chancellor—a lawyer of assured position.

The general view of the universe then held by scientific men supplied the framework within which the philosophers labored; it did not occur to the metaphysicians that the modes of thought in which this universe was conceived could be subjected to fundamental criticism. What, next, was this view? Briefly, it may be called static, molar and mechanical in the strictest sense of the word mechanism. It dealt with self-contained bodies in equilibrium or at rest; with self-contained aggregations of matter capable of measurement; with the relations subsisting between self-contained wholes; that is, with external connection, not with internal self-manifestation. As time passed, this general conception of things became more and more firmly rooted, thanks to Newton's genius. Indeed, it maintained itself with little change, especially in the English-speaking countries and in France, till forty-five years of the nineteenth century had winged their way. Whewell, in his great 'History of the Inductive Sciences' (1837-57), displays astonishing ignorance of the transformations that were afoot in his day—of Gauss and Weber on absolute measurements, of Schwann on the cell theory, of Mohl on protoplasm, of Mayer on heat, of Helmholtz on the conservation of energy, of Herapath on the mechanical theory of gases and the like. If the hold of the 'Newtonian philosophy' remained so strong at this date, we can infer readily how exclusive was its predominance in previous times. Now the theory of the universe contained in the Principia had a distinctively philosophical aspect