Substantial forms (in
other words our secondary qualities) hardly outlasted the year of
our Lord 1600. People were already tired of them then; and Galileo,
and Descartes, with his 'new philosophy,' gave them only a little
later their coup de grace.
But now if the new kinds of scientific 'thing,' the corpuscular and
etheric world, were essentially more 'true,' why should they have
excited so much criticism within the body of science itself?
Scientific logicians are saying on every hand that these entities
and their determinations, however definitely conceived, should not
be held for literally real. It is AS IF they existed; but in reality
they are like co-ordinates or logarithms, only artificial short-cuts
for taking us from one part to another of experience's flux. We can
cipher fruitfully with them; they serve us wonderfully; but we must
not be their dupes.
There is no RINGING conclusion possible when we compare these types
of thinking, with a view to telling which is the more absolutely
true. Their naturalness, their intellectual economy, their
fruitfulness for practice, all start up as distinct tests of their
veracity, and as a result we get confused. Common sense is BETTER
for one sphere of life, science for another, philosophic criticism
for a third; but whether either be TRUER absolutely, Heaven only
knows.
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