PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR
MORE than twenty years have elapsed since these lessons were delivered at the Sorbonne. In the interval, science has advanced with giant strides ; and there can be no doubt but that I should have to examine many a scientifico-philosophical theory of which this work makes no mention, were I now to recommence the course I then gave. All the same, I do not think that the problem raised in my classes during the session 1892-3 has been solved or that it has ceased to elicit the keenest interest. Our object is to discover whether the idea of natural law is the same for the scientist as it is for the philosopher.
Science proposes to explain things scien tifically. And, in these days more espe cially, the concept of scientific explanation has received precise definition. It comprises neither the knowledge of the intrinsic nature of things, nor that of their origin or value.
It implies the possibility of extracting, from the given reality, sensibly constant rapports, and it declares that such a rap port is explained, when it has been possible to reduce it to some other rapport already known and recognized as permanent and general. Science is reduction. Mathematics is its ideal, its form par excellence, for it is in mathematics that assimilation, identifica tion, is most perfectly realized. The uni verse, scientifically explained, would be a certain formula, one and eternal, regarded as the equivalent of the entire diversity and movement of things.
The philosopher asks himself whether natural law as assumed by science, wholly coincides with law as really existing in nature ; whether science and reality are so alike that science may be regarded as exhaust ing everything intelligible and true that the real contains.
The theory upheld in the present work is that no absolute coincidence exists be tween the laws of nature as science assumes them to be, and the laws of nature as they really are. The former may be compared to laws proclaimed by a legislator and imposed a priori upon reality. The latter are harmonies towards which we ascertain that the actions of different beings really tend. The former are abstract rapports, the elements of which are themselves rapports; the latter are concrete rapports, the terms of which are real subjects, true beings.
Now, the doctrine here set forth consists in regarding scientific intelligibility as the most objective form, but not as the sole type, of intelligibility. Science acquires that perfection which characterizes it, by setting aside, sending about their business, as Plato would say ....
advertisement