Abstract science

“ Speaking from this point of view, I would point out the error of making the utilitarian applications of knowledge the main object in its pursuit. It is an historic fact that abstract science—science pursued without any utilitarian end—has been at the base of our progress in the utilization of knowledge. ”

“ The special science, because special or partial and because at the same time courting scientific character or validity, that is, conformity with reality, must be relative, formal, abstract, artificial, unreal, but also for exactly the same reason it must contrive to admit to its conceptions other view-points than its own. ”

“ Indeed, without abstractions, science is not even conceivable; for all science, as such, proceeds from abstract principles to abstract conclusions. But though the process of scientific reasoning be abstract, real science deals with real objects and real relations. And such is exactly the case with metaphysics, which is the universal science of all reality, and the queen of all the real sciences. ”

“ The problem of experimental science is the sequence of cause and effect in material phenomena. It is only necessary for experimental science to introduce the question of a final cause for it to become nonsensical. The problem of abstract science is the recognition of the primordial essence of life. ”

“ Accordingly, if you have a logical head, you can deduce a variety of conclusions respecting the relationships between these abstract entities. Furthermore, if the abstractions are well-founded, that is to say, if they do not abstract from everything that is important in experience, the scientific thought which confines itself to these abstractions will arrive at a variety of important truths relating to our experience of nature. We all know those clear-cut trenchant intellects, immovably encased in a hard shell of abstractions. ”

“ Every scientific discovery, such as photography, is a step in advance of preceding discovery. If Newton had not discovered the fundamental properties of light, in the seventeenth century, we should, in all likelihood, have had no photography in the nineteenth. Abstract science is the parent of practical art. ”

“ THE sciences are divided by Spencer, Karl Pearson and others into two great groups, the abstract sciences and the concrete sciences. The abstract sciences are those which deal with the modes under which the phenomenal world is perceived. ”

“ While we have endeavored to show that abstract science is entitled to high appreciation and liberal support, we do not claim for it the power of solving questions belonging to other realms of thought. ”

“ Where other domains, such as mathematics, logic, linguistics, and physics are intent on understanding the abstract notions around which their domains are built, on giving them life in the context of practical experiences, philosophy seems driven by the quest for reaching the next level of abstraction, the abstraction of abstractions, and so on. Science uses abstraction as an instrument for reaching concreteness; philosophy follows the inverse path. There is always to the philosophic attempt a call for the next step, into the infinite. ”

“ 'The Philosophy of Nature takes up the material, prepared for it by physics out of experience, at the point to which physics has brought it, and again transforms it, without basing it ultimately on the authority of experience. Physics therefore must work into the hands of philosophy, so that the latter may translate into a true comprehension (Begriff) the abstract universal transmitted to it, showing how it issues from that comprehension as an intrinsically necessary whole. ”

“ Not only do these methods fail to reveal the situation but the intellectual attitude of abstraction to which they accustom us seriously handicaps us when we want not merely to explain the situation but to know it. Now it is the business of science to explain situations in terms of general laws and so the intellectual method of abstract-ion is the right one for scientists to employ. ”

“ It requires that physical actions shall be critically examined, the factors and results measured, and different cases contrasted, before there can be reached clear ideas of necessary causal dependence. And thus to investigate physical actions is the business of the Abstract-Concrete Sciences. Every experiment which the physicist or the chemist makes brings afresh before his consciousness the truth, given countless times in his previous experiences, that from certain antecedents of particular kinds there will inevitably follow a particular kind of consequent ”

“ While, however, study of the Abstract-Concrete Sciences, carried on experimentally, gives clearness and strength to the consciousness of causation, taken alone it is inadequate as a discipline; and, when pursued exclusively, generates a habit of thought which betrays into erroneous conclusions when higher orders of phenomena are dealt with. The process of physical inquiry is essentially analytical ”

“ But there is nothing done for the abstract sciences, nothing for the departments of knowledge which are the domain of intelligence, the applications of mathematics to arts and to war, physics, chemistry, medicine, natural history, botany, and experimental studies. ”

“ If human thought proceeded with the orderly method which abstract logic would suggest to it, we might go further and say that a classification of natural entities should be the first step in science itself. Perhaps you will be inclined to reply that this classification has already been effected, and that science is concerned with the adventures of material entities in space and time. ”

“ Instead of regarding some Sciences as wholly abstract, and others as wholly concrete, he regards each Science as having an abstract part, and a concrete part. There is, according to him, an abstract mathematics and a concrete mathematics—an abstract biology and concrete biology. ”

“ Their completeness of abstraction from the accidents of experience, from the differences, qualifications, variations which contribute so largely to the personal interests of life, this it is which makes the abstract sciences demonstrative, exact, and universally applicable. In so far, therefore, as we are permitted to grasp the conception of a perfectly abstract existence prior to, and underlying, and enclosing, all separate existences, so far also do we get to a conception which is demonstrative, exact, and universally applicable throughout the whole world of knowable objects. ”

“ The sciences, are sometimes divided into the abstract and the natural; by the former we are taught the knowledge of reasons and their conclusions; by the latter we are enabled to find out causes and effects, and to study the laws by which the material world is governed. To the abstract sciences belong, first, language, whether oral or written, including grammar, logic, &c.; secondly, notation, including arithmetic, algebra, geometry, &c. Philosophy inquires into the laws that regulate the phenomena of nature, whether in the material or immaterial world ”

“ For many centuries physical science itself suffered from the dead weight of abstract notions accepted as data, and was inert for want of a true method. Its recent successes are an index to the advance which moral science might make if it could adopt the right way of investigation, comparison, and reflective reasoning. ”

“ Nothing is more impressive than the fact that, as mathematics withdrew increasingly into the upper regions of ever greater extremes of abstract thought, it returned back to earth with a corresponding growth of importance for the analysis of concrete fact. ”

“ Thus scientific objects are the concrete causal characters, though we arrive ‘at them by a route of apprehension which is a process of abstraction. In the same way, what, in the form of a sense-object, is concrete for our awareness, is abstract in its character of a complex of relations between scientific objects. ”

“ The point before us is that this scientific field of thought is now, in the twentieth century, too narrow for the concrete facts which are before it for analysis. This is true even in physics, and is more especially urgent in the biological sciences. Thus, in order to understand the difficulties of modern scientific thought and also its reactions on the modern world, we should have in our minds some conception of a wider field of abstraction, a more concrete analysis, which shall stand nearer to the complete concreteness of our intuitive experience. ”

“ But these, continues Albertus, have not reflected that although there are many sciences, and each has its special modus, yet there is one modus common to all sciences, pertaining to that which is common to them all: the principle, to wit, that through reason’s inquiry, from what is known one arrives at knowledge of the unknown. This mode or method common to every science may be considered in itself, and so may be the subject of a special science. ”

“ As for the rise of the scientific view, we may well return to the definition of science given above: the ordinary consciousness highly developed, not without considerable abstraction, into critically conscious method and clearest possible perception. Perhaps development of anything is always at the cost of abstraction; but be this as it may, science certainly arises through an abstraction, namely, through the abstraction of consciousness of one's world, through the treatment of this mere consciousness as something to be cultivated quite for its own sake ”

“ The processes by which truth is attained, reasoning and observation, have been carried to their greatest known perfection in the physical sciences. As classical literature furnishes the most perfect types of the art of expression, so do the physical sciences those of the art of thinking. Mathematics, and its application to astronomy and natural philosophy, are the most complete example of the discovery of truths by reasoning; experimental science, of their discovery by direct observation. ”

“ Moreover, specific illustration is hardly necessary in the sphere of the different physical sciences, or again, in that of the social or the psychological sciences, for within each one of these groups the affinity but just now referred to has been very clearly exemplified, as in the interesting case of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, which nowadays are one science, not three, and which can be held apart only on methodological grounds, not metaphysically. ”

“ Those sciences, which thus got the name of philosophy, we call empirical sciences, for the reason that they take their departure from experience. Still the essential results which they aim at and provide, are laws, general propositions, a theory—the thoughts of what is found existing. On this ground the Newtonian physics was called Natural Philosophy. ”

“ Indeed, the attentive study of the fine abstractions of science lifts the mind from the grossness of matter, step by step, to the refinements of immateriality, and there appear, shadowed out beyond the physical forces which man can test and try, other powers still ascending, until they reach the Source of every good and every perfect gift. ”

“ There is, if we will but reflect and understand that the course of procedure proper to the physical sciences, namely, the assumption that their, objects and the facts appertaining to these objects lie before them ready-made—is utterly inadmissible in true philosophy—is totally at variance with the scope and spirit of a science which professes to deal fairly with the phenomena of man. ”

“ The superiority of modern science consists in the fact that each step forward it takes is a step further in the order of abstractions. We make chemistry from chemistry, algebra from algebra; the very indefatigability with which we fathom nature removes us further from her. ”

“ So when the child introduces this idea of collection into his mind in a wholly instinctive way, by identifying the things he sees, he begins to perform abstraction. This abstraction delivers him from all the complications and all the annoyances that come to him from the contemplation of real objects. By the philosophic process of abstraction it has been possible to construct all the sciences, and especially the science of magnitudes. ”

“ So long as it remains confined to this narrow sphere, it perpetually revolves in the same orbit, and, properly speaking, produces no ulterior results of a knowledge fruitful and applicable to actual and outward life.
The second degree or moment of science is abstraction, by virtue of which, from the complete sum of all the criteria and characteristics of an object, or, rather, of a thought, some one is prominently set forth as the most essential, and for the sake of communication designated by a name. ”

“ And, in truth, there is scarcely any investigation in the whole body of a science requiring so high a degree of analysis and abstraction, as the inquiry, what the science itself is; in other words, what are the properties common to all the truths composing it, and distinguishing them from all other truths. ”

“ Without descending to the minute interdependence of the different branches of any one science or art, is it not evident that among the different sciences, as well as among most of the arts, there exists such a connection, that if the state of any one well-marked division of them is sufficiently known to us, we can with real scientific assurance infer, from their necessary correlation, the contemporaneous state of every one of the others? ”

“ Physical science is to find out facts, metaphysics is the thread to bind the flowers into a bouquet. Every abstraction is metaphysical; even putting manure at the root of a tree involves a process of abstraction. ”