I have traced in this book, as well as my ignorance and my indolence have allowed me, not indeed the whole history of the idea of nature from the early Greeks to the present day, but certain points concerned with three periods in that history about which I happen to be less ignorant than I am about the rest. Having reached a sort of ending, I must close with a warning and a question. The warning is that the ending is not a conclusion. Hegel, nailing to the counter in advance the lie that he regarded his own philosophy as final, wrote at the end of his treatise on the philosophy of history, Bis hierher ist das Bewusstseyn gekommen, ‘That is as far as consciousness has reached’. Similarly, I must say now, ‘That is as far as science has reached’. All that has been said is a mere interim report on the history of the idea of nature down to the present time. If I knew what further progress would be made in the future, I should already have made that progress. Far from knowing what kind of progress it would be, I do not know that it will be made at all. I have no guarantee that the spirit of natural science will survive the attack which now, from so many sides, is being made upon the life of human reason.
The question is: ‘Where do we go from here? What constructive suggestions arise from the criticism I have brought, however timidly, against the conclusions of Alexander and Whitehead?’ I will try to answer.
Throughout the long tradition of European thought it has been said, not by everyone but by most people, or at any rate by most of those who have proved that they have a right to be heard, that nature, though it is a thing that really exists, is not a thing that exists in itself or in its own right, but a thing which depends for its existence upon something else. I take this to imply that natural science, considered as a department or form of human thought, is a going concern, able to raise its own problems and to solve them by its own methods, and to criticize the solutions it has offered by applying its own criteria: in other words, that natural science is not a tissue of fancies or fabrications, mythology or tautology, but is a search for truth, and a search that does not go unrewarded: but that natural science is not, as the positivists imaged, the only department or form of human thought about which this can be said, and is not even a self-contained and self-sufficient form of thought, but depends for its very existence upon some other form of thought which is different from it and cannot be reduced to it.
I think that the time has come when we should ask what this other form of thought is, and try to understand it, its methods, its aims, and its objects, no less adequately than men like Whitehead and Alexander have tried to understand the methods and aims of natural science, and the natural world which is the object of natural science. I do not think that the defects I seem to have noticed in the philosophy of these great men can be removed by what may be called the direct route of starting according to their own methods from their own starting point and doing their work over again and doing it better. I do not think it can be done even by starting from their own starting point and working by better methods. I think that these defects are due to something in their starting point itself. That starting point, I think, involves a certain relic of positivism. It involves the assumption that the sole task of a cosmological philosophy is to reflect upon what natural science can tell us about nature, as if natural science were, I will not say the only valid form of thought, but the only form of thought which a philosopher should take into account when he tries to answer the question what nature is. But I submit that if nature is a thing that depends for its existence on something else, this dependence is a thing that must be taken into account when we try to understand what nature is; and that if natural science is a form of thought that depends for its existence upon some other form of thought, we cannot adequately reflect upon what natural science tells us without taking into account the form of thought upon which it depends.
What is this form of thought? I answer, ‘History’. Natural science (I assume for the moment that the positivistic account of it is at least correct so far as it goes) consists of facts and theories. A scientific fact is an event in the world of nature. A scientific theory is a hypothesis about that event, which further events verify or disprove. An event in the world of nature becomes important for the natural scientist only on condition that it is observed. "The fact that the event has happened" is a phrase in the vocabulary of natural science which means ‘the fact that the event has been observed.’ That is to say, has been observed by someone at sometime under some conditions: the observer must be a trustworthy observer and the conditions must be of such a kind as to permit trustworthy observations to be made. And lastly, but not least, the observer must have recorded his observations in such a way that knowledge of what he has observed is public property. The scientist who wishes to know that such an event has taken place in the world of nature can know this only by consulting the record left by the observer and interpreting it, subject to certain rules, in such a way as to satisfy himself that the man whose work it records really did observe what he professes to have observed. This consultation and interpretation of records is the characteristic feature of historical work. Every scientist who says that Newton observed the effect of prism on sunlight, or that Adams saw Neptune, or that Pasteur observed that grape juice played upon by air raised to a certain temperature underwent no fermentation, is talking history. The facts first observed by Newton, Adams, and Pasteur have since been observed by others; but every scientist who says that light is split up by the prism or that Neptune exists or that fermentation is prevented by a certain degree of heat is still talking history: he is talking about the whole class of historical facts which are occasions on which someone has made these observations. Thus, a ‘scientific fact’ is a class of historical facts; and no one can understand what a scientific fact is unless he understands enough about the theory of history to understand what an historical fact is.
The same is true of theories. A scientific theory not only rests on certain historical facts and is verified or disproved by certain other historical facts; it is itself a historical fact, namely, the fact that someone has propounded or accepted verified or disproved, that theory. If we want to know, for example, what the classical theory of gravitation is, we must look into the records of Newton’s thinking and interpret them: and this is historical research.
I conclude that natural science as a form of thought exists and always has existed in a context of history, and depends on historical thought for its existence. From this I venture to infer that no one can understand natural science unless he understands history: and that no one can answer the question what nature is unless he knows what history is. This is a question which Alexander and Whitehead have not asked. And that is why I answer the question, ‘Where do we go from here?’ by saying, ‘We go from the idea of nature to the idea of history.’ The Idea of History T
| Last Updated: 10/19/22 |