Part 31 (2/2)

These are but hints and examples. They suffice, I hope, to show that the workers in this division have deep common interests, and will do well, in future, to study the arts of cooperation, and to regard one another's progress with a watchful and cordial sympathy. In a word: Our common problem is the theory of the categories. That problem can be solved only by the cooperation of the mathematicians and of the philosophers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

_Hand-painted Photogravure from a Painting by Otto Knille. Reproduced from a Photograph of the Painting by permission of the Berlin Photograph Co._

This famous painting is now in the University of Berlin. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest of the scholastic philosophers, surnamed the ”Angelic Doctor,” is delivering a learned discourse before King Louis IX. To the right of the King stands Joinville, the French chronicler.

The Dominican monk with his hand to his face is Guillaume de Saint Amour, and Vincent de Beauvais, and another Dominican are seated with their backs to the platform desk from which Thomas Aquinas is making his animated address. The picture is thoroughly characteristic of a University disputation at the close of the Middle Ages.]

DEPARTMENT I--PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT I--PHILOSOPHY

(_Hall 6, September 20, 11.15 a. m._)

CHAIRMAN: PROFESSOR BORDEN P. BOWNE, Boston University.

SPEAKERS: PROFESSOR GEORGE H. HOWISON, University of California.

PROFESSOR GEORGE T. LADD, Yale University.

In opening the Department of Philosophy, the Chairman, Professor Borden P. Bowne, LL.D., of Boston University, made an interesting address on the Philosophical Outlook. Professor Bowne said in part:--

I congratulate the members of the Philosophical Section on the improved outlook in philosophy. In the generation just pa.s.sed, philosophy was somewhat at a discount. The great and rapid development of physical science and invention, together with the profound changes in biological thought, produced for a time a kind of chaos. New facts were showered upon us in great abundance, and we had no adequate philosophical preparation for dealing with them. Such a condition is always disturbing. The old mental equilibrium is overthrown and readjustment is a slow process. Besides, the shallow sense philosophy of that time readily lent itself to mechanical and materialistic interpretations, and for a while it seemed as if all the higher faiths of humanity were permanently discredited. All this has pa.s.sed away. Philosophical criticism began its work and the nave dogmatism of materialistic naturalism was soon disposed of.

It quickly appeared that our trouble was not due to the new facts, but to the superficial philosophy by which they had been interpreted. Now that we have a better philosophy, we have come to live in perfect peace with the facts once thought disturbing, and even to welcome them as valuable additions to knowledge....

The brief naturalistic episode was not without instruction for us. It showed conclusively the great practical importance of philosophy. Had we had thirty years ago the current philosophical insight, the great development of the physical and biological sciences would have made no disturbance whatever. But being interpreted by a crude scheme of thought, it produced somewhat of a storm.

Philosophy may not contribute much of positive value, but it certainly has an important negative function in the way of suppressing pretentious dogmatism and fict.i.tious knowledge, which often lead men astray. It is these things which produce conflicts of science and religion or which find in evolution the solvent of all mysteries and the source of all knowledge.

Concerning the part.i.tion of territory between science and philosophy, there are two distinct questions respecting the facts of experience. First, we need to know the facts in their temporal and spatial order, and the way they hang together in a system of law. To get this knowledge is the function of science, and in this work science has inalienable rights and a most important practical function.

This work cannot be done by speculation nor interfered with by authority of any kind. It is not surprising, then, that scientists in their sense of contact with reality should be indignant with, or feel contempt for, any who seek to limit or proscribe their research. But supposing this work all done, there remains another question respecting the causality and interpretation of the facts. This question belongs to philosophy. Science describes and registers the facts with their temporal and spatial laws; philosophy studies their causality and significance. And while the scientist justly ignores the philosopher who interferes with his inquiries, so the philosopher may justly reproach the scientist who fails to see that the scientific question does not touch the philosophic one....

In the field of metaphysics proper I note a strong tendency toward personal idealism, or as it might be called, Personalism; that is, the doctrine that substantial reality can be conceived only under the personal form and that all else is phenomenal. This is quite distinct from the traditional idealisms of mere conceptionism. It holds the essential fact to be a community of persons with a Supreme Person at their head while the phenomenal world is only expression and means of communication. And to this view we are led by the failure of philosophizing on the impersonal plane, which is sure to lose itself in contradiction and impossibility. Under the form of mechanical naturalism, with its tendencies to materialism and atheism, impersonalism has once more been judged and found wanting. We are not likely to have a recurrence of this view unless there be a return to philosophical barbarism. But impersonalism at the opposite pole in the form of abstract categories of being, causality, unity, ident.i.ty, continuity, sufficient reason, etc., is equally untenable. Criticism shows that these categories when abstractly and impersonally taken cancel themselves. On the impersonal plane we can never reach unity from plurality, or plurality from unity; and we can never find change in ident.i.ty, or ident.i.ty in change. Continuity in time becomes mere succession without the notion of potentiality, and this in turn is empty. Existence itself is dispersed into nothingness through the infinite divisibility of s.p.a.ce and time, while the law of the sufficient reason loses itself in barren tautology and the infinite regress.

The necessary logical equivalence of cause and effect in any impersonal scheme makes all real explanation and progress impossible, and shuts us up to an unintelligible oscillation between potentiality and actuality, to which there is no corresponding thought....

Philosophy is still militant and has much work before it, but the omens are auspicious, the problems are better understood, and we are coming to a synthesis of the results of past generations of thinking which will be a very distinct progress. Philosophy has already done good service, and never better than in recent times, by destroying pretended knowledge and making room for the higher faiths of humanity. It has also done good service in helping these faiths to better rational form, and thus securing them against the defilements of superst.i.tion and the cavilings of hostile critics. With all its aberrations and shortcomings, philosophy deserves well of humanity.

PHILOSOPHY: ITS FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND ITS METHODS

BY GEORGE HOLMES HOWISON

[George Holmes Howison, Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity, University of California.

b. Montgomery County, Maryland, 1834. A.B. Marietta College, 1852; M.A. 1855; LL.D. _ibid._ 1883. Post-graduate, Lane Theological Seminary, University of Berlin, and Oxford.

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