Scientific postulate

“ 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. ”

“ The only sense in which necessity can be ascribed to the conclusions of any scientific investigation, is that of legitimately following from some assumption, which, by the conditions of the inquiry, is not to be questioned. In this relation, of course, the derivative truths of every deductive science must stand to the inductions, or assumptions, on which the science is founded, and which, whether true or untrue, certain or doubtful in themselves, are always supposed certain for the purposes of the particular science. ”

“ In thus attempting to ascertain the general order of nature by ascertaining the particular order of the occurrence of each one of the phenomena of nature, the most scientific proceeding can be no more than an improved form of that which was primitively pursued by the human understanding, while undirected by science. ”

“ The other consideration I have to put before you is that, whatever may be the results at which physical science as applied to man shall arrive, those results are inevitable—I mean that they arise out of the necessary progress of scientific thought as applied to man. ”

“ It is a general truth that the physical sciences of light and heat are based upon mechanical conditions of the particles of matter; that the science of chemistry is founded upon physics; that biological phenomena are dependent upon physical and chemical conditions; that psychological subjects are based upon biology; and that biological science cannot progress excepting in proportion to the advance of the sciences on which it is based. ”

“ Aims at a critical comparison of scientific methods of thought, with special reference to the relations between biology and the " exact sciences " of chemistry and physics.
"Interesting and valuable . . . original and striking . . . should be read and studied by all thinking men and women." — Education. ”

“ The interest in the formulation of general rules for practical interference with nature, again, necessarily dictates the form which our scientific descriptions will take, and is thus the source of those practical postulates of empirical science with which we have already made some acquaintance. 284It compels us to assume, in the first place, as an indispensable condition of success in our descriptions, that there are situations in the physical order which may be treated with sufficient accuracy for our practical purposes, as recurring identically ”

“ For the conclusions stated in the present work, respecting knowledge and discovery, are drawn from a connected and systematic survey of the whole range of Physical Science and its History; whereas, hitherto, philosophers have contented themselves with adducing detached examples of scientific doctrines, drawn from one or two departments of science. ”

“ The fundamental propositions rest on a much broader basis of experiment than any of the beliefs which are held most strongly in every day life. Under these circumstances nobody should speak disparagingly of the validity of scientific knowledge — not even the scientist himself. ”

“ One of the urgent needs of modern physical science is a thorough investigation of the nature, methods, and aids of scientific cognition, and thus of the nature of its real limits, chiefly in the light of the teachings of comparative philology and comparative psychology. ”

“ On this point even physicists agree. "Instead of regarding the proper object of physical science as a search after essential causes," says one of the best modern champions of scientific progress, "it ought to be, and must be, a search after facts and relations." [90] Hence, physical science deals with natural facts and their relations exclusively; the search after causes and essential principles constitutes the object of a higher science; and such a science is real philosophy, or metaphysics proper. ”

“ In any special natural science, a scientific description appears as an adjustment, express, conscious, exact, of the internal structure of a system of ideas to the external structure of a world of preexistent facts; and the business of science has been repeatedly defined, of late years, as simply and wholly taken up with the exact description of the facts of nature. ”

“ Furthermore, the maxim that all the phenomena of nature must be explained by means of the simplest factors and according to the smallest possible [pg 194] number of laws, is usually regarded as one of the most legitimate maxims of science in general, so that the resolute pertinacity with which many investigators maintain the entire sufficiency of the mechanical interpretation, far from being condemned as materialistic fanaticism, must be respected as the expression of scientific conscience. ”

“ In so far as the chemical and biological sciences involve the recognition of qualitative distinctions and the consequent use of categories which are non-mechanical, it is these æsthetic and historical interests, and not the primary scientific interest in the control of natural phenomena, which are subserved by their elaboration. ”

“ Science being proved truth, scientific method requires that all the factors which concern the subject of research shall be duly considered, in order to arrive at correct thought respecting the special subject of inquiry. ”

“ But a disposition to such a judgment arises in a great measure from this, that the mathematical and mathematico-physical sciences have, in a great degree, determined men's views of the general nature and form of scientific truth; while Natural History has not yet had time or opportunity to exert its due influence upon the current habits of philosophizing. ”

“ The advance of scientific knowledge—the astonishing discovery of the atom and the cell, and of the unsubstantially or unmateriality, so to speak, of matter itself, and of the elusiveness of energy and life, as indicated by the newer theories of the nature of the ether, and the acceptance of thought-transference as a physical or psychological fact—these and other remarkable scientific discoveries which are leading science to what is seemingly the borderline of a world beyond the cognizance of the bodily senses, have powerfully affected the rationalism and idealism of the present day. ”

“ At the present day, when we have under our notice so many sciences, of such wide extent, so well established; a Philosophy of the Sciences ought, it must seem, to be founded, not upon conjecture, but upon an examination of many instances;—should not consist of a few vague and unconnected maxims, difficult and doubtful in their application, but should form a system of which every part has been repeatedly confirmed and verified. ”

“ But in each of those sciences we shall obtain solid and complete systems of knowledge, only so far as we study, with steady thought and careful observation, that peculiar kind of cause which is appropriate to the phenomena under our consideration. ”

“ The various facts mentioned in this chapter prove that mind agrees with the various forms of physical energy in many essential points, and obeys many of the same laws or principles. Examine whatever general phenomena of the mind we may, we can always detect some apparent or real connection of them with the great principles of inorganic nature; and in order to prove the dependence of them upon the great principles of science it is not necessary to show that all such actions are subject to those principles. ”

“ And when we fully recognize that a problem is being solved, we have only to gain some appreciation of its general nature and conditions, in order to reach some important, though limited, conclusions, which may fairly be called scientific, as to the meaning of the answer. These conclusions are not scientific in the sense of giving us quantitative and precise formulæ, but they may be so far scientific as to be certain and reliable. ”

“ We have seen that in other subjects the Fundamental Ideas on which science depended, and the Conceptions derived from these, were at first vague, obscure, and confused;—that by gradual steps, by a constant union of thought and observation, these conceptions become more and more clear, more and more definite;—and that when they approached complete distinctness and precision, there were made great positive discoveries into which these conceptions entered ”

“ No man of science, surely, holds that all statements of the laws of phenomena are equally well ‘proved’ by observation and experiment. They do hold that such a proposition as that of ‘the uniformity of nature,’ considered as a ‘law of phenomena,’ is founded on observation and experiment, as fully as any proposition of natural mode can be. ”

“ So long as we select our examples in this arbitrary and limited manner, we lose the best part of that philosophical instruction, which the sciences are fitted to afford when we consider them as all members of one series, and as governed by rules which are the same for all. Mathematical and chemical truths, physical and physiological doctrines, the sciences of 10 classification and of causation, must alike be taken into our account, in order that we may learn what are the general characters of real knowledge. ”

“ After this preliminary statement of the results of experimental investigation, we said, "Therefore, it is now regarded as a fundamental truth of physical science, and a fundamental law of Nature, that force, like matter, is never created or destroyed." The proposition is stated as an inference, as an induction from observations, as a result of experimental inquiry into the physical processes of Nature, and as a pure principle of science. ”

“ The postulate of Science is admitted on all hands to be the uniformity of nature, and the proof of this postulate has been found to consist in an induction from the facts which nature presents and our senses observe. ”

“ When a phenomenon is produced according to a certain law of nature, we call the law [or rule] the cause of that phenomenon; and to the laws or rules of nature we accordingly ascribe power or efficiency. The whole business of physics is to discover, by observation and experiment, the laws of nature, and to apply them to the solution of phenomena. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What people call applied science is nothing but the application of pure science to particular classes of problems. It consists of deductions from those general principles, established by reasoning and observation, which constitute pure science. ”

“ So, disregarding the opinions of certain cultivators of science, we are here to ask the more pertinent question, What is there — if indeed there be anything — in the nature of science itself, as science is now known, what is there in its results or in its method, that points to a pantheistic interpretation of the world? ”

“ 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. ”

“ When physical science is said to depend on the assumption that the course of nature is invariable, all that is meant is that the conclusions of physical science are not known as absolute truths: the truth of them is conditional on the uniformity of the course of nature; and all that the most conclusive observations and experiments can prove, is that the result arrived at will be true if, and as long as, the present laws of nature are valid. But this is all the assurance we require for the guidance of our conduct. ”

“ Let us, then, run a parallel between the procedure of science as applied to nature, and the procedure of science as applied to man, and see whether, in the latter case, science does not occupy a position of such a nature, that if she maintains it, all the true phenomena for which she is looking necessarily become invisible; and if she deserts it, she forgoes her own existence. ”

“ In addition to this, each science, to establish its own truths, needs those of all the sciences anterior to it. The only means, for example, by which the physiological laws of life could have been ascertained, was by distinguishing, among the multifarious and complicated facts of life, the portion which physical and chemical laws cannot account for. ”

“ We recognize this when we divide science into that which is experimental, or depends on apparatus, and that which is observational and classificatory—distinctions, these, which relate not so much to the objects of science as to our methods of pursuing them. This view also opens up to us the thought that the domain of science is practically boundless; for who can set limits to the action of mind on the universe, or of the universe on mind? ”

“ The great generalizations of modern science—the Conservation of Energy, the process of Evolution—are the products of Reason. They are metaphysical conceptions. Like the atomic theory or the law of gravitation, they are practical formulæ necessary to the advancement of science from the structure of our minds but they are the results of reason, not of sense. ”

“ You have all heard it repeated, I dare say, that men of science work by means of induction and deduction, and that by the help of these operations, they, in a sort of sense, wring from Nature certain other things, which are called natural laws, and causes, and that out of these, by some cunning skill of their own, they build up hypotheses and theories. ”