Science and Philosophy

Abstract

THERE are men of science who are undisguisedly alarmed and greatly discouraged at the tendency of the hew mathematical and physical theories to plunge science into metaphysics. The new principles seem to be throwing doubt on the basis of science and confusing the pure positivity of its method. The value of the scientific work of the mathematicians who have formulated the principle of relativity is unquestionable and unquestioned, but their abandonment of the common-sense basis of scientific reality seems to many a high price to pay for an advance in theoretical knowledge. The fear goes deeper. Twenty-five centuries of philosophical speculation have failed to produce any general agreement among philosophers on the fundamental principles of metaphysics. If physical science is to be dragged in as arbiter to decide problems of epistemology, can its own principles be kept free from the doubt and obscurity which invade metaphysics? The authors of this trouble are not speculative philosophers, insinuating dialectical paradoxes, upsetting scientific workers in their straightforward experimental researches, but men of science with a particular genius for pushing scientific investigation into domains which, in the literal meaning of the term metaphysics, lie beyond physics.