In the history of European thought there have been three periods of constructive cosmological thinking; three periods, that is to say, when the idea of nature has come into the focus of thought, become the subject of intense and protracted reflection, and consequently acquired new characteristics which in their turn have given a new aspect to the detailed science of nature that has been based upon it.
To say that the detailed science of nature is ‘based’ upon the idea of nature does not imply that the idea of nature in general, the idea of nature as a whole, is worked out first, in abstraction from any detailed study of natural fact, and that when this abstract idea of nature is complete people go on to erect upon it a superstructure of detailed natural sciences. What it implies is not a temporal relation but a logical one. In natural science, as in economics or morals or law, people begin with the details. They begin by tackling individual problems as they arise. Only when this detail has accumulated to a considerable amount do they reflect upon the work they have been doing and discover that they have been doing it in a methodical way, according to principles of which hitherto they have not been conscious.
But the temporal priority of detailed work to reflection on the principles implied in it must not be exaggerated. It would be an exaggeration, for example, to think that a ‘period’ of detailed work in natural science, or any other field of thought or action, a ‘period’ lasting for half a century or even for half a decade, is followed by a ‘period’ of reflection on the principles which logically underlie it. Such a contrast between ‘periods’ of non-philosophical thinking and subsequent ‘periods’ of philosophizing is perhaps what Hegel meant to assert in his famous lament, at the end of the Preface to the Philosophie des Rechts: ‘When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a form of life has aged; and grey in grey does not enable us to make it young again, but only to know it. The owl of Minerva begins to fly only at the coming of dusk.’ If that was what Hegel meant, he made a mistake: and a mistake which Marx only turned upside down and did not correct when he wrote that ‘philosophy hitherto has confined itself to interpreting the world: the point, however, is to change it’ (Theses on Feuerbach, xi). The complaint against philosophy is borrowed, in the very same words, from Hegel; only what Hegel represents as a necessary feature of all philosophy Marx represents as a defect to which philosophy was subject until he, Marx, revolutionized it.
In fact, the detailed work seldom goes on for any length of time without reflection intervening. And this reflection reacts upon the detailed work; for when people become conscious of the principle upon which they have been thinking or acting they become conscious of something which in these thoughts and actions they have been trying, though unconsciously, to do: namely to work out in detail the logical implications of those principles. To strong minds this new consciousness gives a new strength, namely a new firmness in their approach to the detailed problems. To weak minds it adds a new temptation, the temptation to that kind of pedantry which consists in remembering the principle and forgetting the special features of the problem to which it is applied.
The detailed study of natural fact is commonly called natural science, or for short simply science; the reflection on principles, whether those of natural science or of any other department of thought or action, is commonly called philosophy. Talking in these terms, and restricting philosophy for the moment to reflection on the principles of natural science, what I have just said may be put by saying that natural science must come first in order that philosophy may have something to reflect on; but that the two things are so closely related that natural science cannot go on for long without philosophy beginning and that philosophy reacts on the science out of which it has grown by giving it in the future a new firmness and consistency arising out of the scientist’s new consciousness of the principles on which he has been working.
For this reason it cannot be well that natural science should be assigned exclusively to one class of persons called scientists and philosophy to another class called philosophers. A man who has never reflected on the principles of his work has not achieved a grown-up man’s attitude towards it; a scientist who has never philosophized about his science can never be more than a second-hand, imitative, journeyman scientist. A man who has never enjoyed a certain type of experience cannot reflect upon it; a philosopher who has never studied and worked at natural science cannot philosophize about it without making a fool of himself.
Before the nineteenth century the more eminent and distinguishable scientists at least had always to some extent philosophized about their science, as their writings testify. And inasmuch as they regarded natural science as their main work, it is reasonable to assume that these testimonies understate the extent of their philosophizing. In the nineteenth century a fashion grew up of separating natural scientists and philosophers into two professional bodies, each knowing little about the other’s work and having little sympathy with it. It is a bad fashion that has done harm to both sides, and on both sides there is an earnest desire to see the last of it and to bridge the gulf of misunderstanding it has created. The bridge must be begun from both ends; and I, as a member of the philosophical profession, can best begin at my end by philosophizing about what experience I have of natural science. Not being a professional scientist, I know that I am likely to make a fool of myself; but the work of bridge-building must go on.
| Last Updated: 10/19/22 |