Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, have all been
utterly sterile, so far as shedding any light on the details of
nature goes, and I can think of no invention or discovery that can
be directly traced to anything in their peculiar thought, for
neither with Berkeley's tar-water nor with Kant's nebular hypothesis
had their respective philosophic tenets anything to do. The
satisfactions they yield to their disciples are intellectual, not
practical; and even then we have to confess that there is a large
minus-side to the account.
There are thus at least three well-characterized levels, stages or
types of thought about the world we live in, and the notions of one
stage have one kind of merit, those of another stage another kind.
It is impossible, however, to say that any stage as yet in sight is
absolutely more TRUE than any other. Common sense is the more
CONSOLIDATED stage, because it got its innings first, and made all
language into its ally. Whether it or science be the more AUGUST
stage may be left to private judgment. But neither consolidation nor
augustness are decisive marks of truth. If common sense were true,
why should science have had to brand the secondary qualities, to
which our world owes all its living interest, as false, and to
invent an invisible world of points and curves and mathematical
equations instead? Why should it have needed to transform causes and
activities into laws of 'functional variation'? Vainly did
scholasticism, common sense's college-trained younger sister, seek
to stereotype the forms the human family had always talked with, to
make them definite and fix them for eternity.
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