Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/81

Rh superstitious and childish when the general estimate of human wisdom so decidedly sinks.

But the more important change is in the extension of the Baconian method to the whole domain of philosophy. While one part of the "wisdom of the world" has been discredited as resting solely on authority, another large division of it is now rejected as resting on inductions insufficient or untrustworthy, and another as resting on groundless assumptions, disguised under the name of necessary truths, truths of the reason, truths given in consciousness, etc. The long habit of trying experiments, the vast experience which has been gained of the mistakes which may be made about matters of fact and of the infinite carelessness of the unscientific mind, have exposed to doubt whatever has been deduced in past ages from facts not recurrent or capable of being reproduced at will. The steady progress of discovery in the experimental sciences has stood out in contrast with the oscillating and unprogressive character of the sciences of mind. Moreover, in their process of extension the experimental sciences have constantly trenched on the domain which was supposed to lie definitively beyond their limit. Physiology has brought us close to mind, and the old distinction between matter and spirit begins to be slighted as a superstition. The old psychology also is assailed as not properly based on physiology. Moral philosophy does not escape. It, as well as the philosophy of law, has suffered through the influx of new knowledge about remote races of men. Duties and rights, which once appeared axiomatic, and inseparable from human nature, now appear the artificial products of special conditions. The very notion of duty itself is represented as such an artificial product.

All these new ideas gathering upon our minds produce a skepticism with regard to current philosophy which extends much further than the particular beliefs with which they seem to conflict. We have grown so accustomed to find so-called incontrovertible axioms resolve themselves into inveterate prejudices, that we have grown shy of all those facile generalities which captivated former ages. Those current abstractions which make up all the morality and all the philosophy of most people, have become suspicious and dangerous to us. Mind and matter, duties and rights, morality and expediency, honor and interest, virtue and vice, all these words, which seemed once to express elementary and certain realities, now strike us as just the words which, thrown into the scientific crucible, might dissolve at once. It is thus not merely philosophy which is discredited, but just that homely and popular wisdom by which common life is guided. This, too, it appears, instead of being the sterling product of plain experience, is the overflow of a spurious philosophy, the redundance of the uncontrolled speculations of thinkers who were unacquainted with scientific method.