THE

PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION

TOGETHER WITH A PRELIMINARY ESSAY ON

THE METAPHYSICAL BASIS OF SCIENCE.

TWO PAPERS

Read before The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters at the Annual
Meetings of February, 1873 and February, 1874.

BY

STEPHEN H. CARPENTER, LL. D.,

Professor of Logic, etc., in the University of Wisconsin, and President of the
Department of Speculative Philosophy in the Wisconsin
Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters.

[Reprinted From the Academy's Transactions.]

MADISON, WIS.:
ATWOOD & CULVER, PRINTERS AND STEREOTYPERS.
1874.

THE METAPHYSICAL BASIS OF SCIENCE.

All knowledge is essentially one. The object-matter upon which intellect exerts itself, does not affect the subjective act of knowing. Physics, when stripped of that which is merely contingent, becomes metaphysics. Physical science deals with object-matter, and discusses the signs by which nature communicates her message—that is, phenomena. Metaphysical science has to do with the subject-mind, and discusses the meaning of the message. The one converts God's hieroglyphics into easily-intelligible language; the other translates this language into Idea. If this be true, there must be a unity of method in all science, however great the diversity of the object-matter investigated. This method is subjectively determined, that is, by the constitution of the mind, and not by the particular form of matter upon which intellectual energy may be exerted. If there is an essential unity in all knowledge, it is because there is a corresponding unity of method in all mental activity. It is only when we look upon what is to be known, that truth separates into sciences; but particular truths become particular sciences only under assumed relations to the whole of which they form a part.

Objectively considered, science is classified knowledge; subjectively viewed, it is the laws or principles according to which knowledge is classified. Every actor implies an act—every thinker a thought. We may therefore universally make this dual classification, according as we view the mental operation involved, or the attributes of objects which form the subject of thought. The possibility of science is conditioned upon the possibility of classification. Mere knowledge is not science, as the world ought to have learned by costly experience. Even classified knowledge may not be science; it becomes science not through previous classification, but in the act of being classified, and therefore only as the principle of classification is apprehended—that is, only as the particular application of the law of generalization is distinctly recognized. A man may know a book and know nothing more; he knows the science only when he is capable of making the book for himself. Mere knowledge thus differs from science in that the one is held only by the apprehensive powers of the mind, while the other passes beyond these into the reflective or ratiocinative. Pure science, then, must be wholly abstract. The forms and substances of Nature with which the scientific student deals, are only the discrete figures of the young mathematician, to be thrown aside with advancing knowledge. Matter is only the staff on which the mind leans, while too feeble to go alone. It is not the finely chiseled statue that renders a man a sculptor; it is the conception which is therein embodied. A day-laborer may have cut the stone, but only the artist could conceive the idea. So in science, we care but little for the particular results at which we arrive, compared with the laws, according to which the results have been attained.

But conceptions cannot be communicated without being rendered objective. The ideal of the artist is locked up in his own mind, until on canvas, in marble, or by means of some other physical symbol, he communicates his high imaginings. Matter, then, according to the present constitution of things is the condition of intellectual communication. Law cannot be studied as abstract law; it can be studied only while acting, and that which exhibits this activity must be matter—something which will always and uniformly obey. There can be no conception of force except as acting, and the sole medium of such activity is matter. Thus again, matter is the condition of all communication from nature to man. Science is thus, in a measure, determined by the conditions of its discovery and communication. But we must distinguish between an invariable condition and that which is thus conditioned. Matter is not science; it is only the condition of its discovery and communication. Air is not hearing; it is the condition of hearing. We do not study matter for the sake of the matter when we study science, but for the sake of the law communicated to us in these changes of matter, and Law is a metaphysical, not a physical idea. Reason, not sense, apprehends it. Law is, so to speak, formulated in the physical, but it is not material. Matter is only the vehicle of science, as language is the vehicle of thought.

It is plain, then, that just as in mathematics we have a division into pure and mixed, according as we deal with matter in the abstract or in the concrete, so we may in any science make a corresponding division, according as we confine our attention to the laws revealed by matter or to the matter revealing the laws: in other words; just as we give attention to the ideas of the message, or to the language in which it is communicated. The language must first be learned, but the words used to communicate the message may be separately understood, and yet the meaning of the message wholly missed. Knowing only the one makes a charlatan; knowing the other makes a savan. The sciences based upon this objective study of Nature are denominated Natural Sciences; and because they lisp the first syllables of Nature's message to man, they should be his primary teachers. It is by their aid that the universal message of God to man must be read. They form, as it were, a public highway leading from Nature to God. But the difficulty is that observing men become so absorbed in admiring some splendid piece of Divine engineering that they stop to gaze and wonder, until losing sight of everything above and beyond, they refuse to advance, fondly imagining that they have reached the end of the journey.

The science based upon this subjective study of Nature is called metaphysics. Logic has been defined as "The Science of Thought;" it should be termed "The Science of Thinking." It is not a dead body which we are studying by dissection, but a living, vital Force, which we study by observing its activities. We find here the same error which we find elsewhere—a stopping with the material symbol, and an ignoring of the intellectual force which clothed itself with the symbol. Astronomy is not the science of circles and spheres, ellipses and ellipsoids, but of the Force whose sensible utterances are given in these curves. We might as well call Painting the science of pictures, or Sculpture the science of statues. So Language, the medium of thought, is only a symbol, less material indeed than pictures and statues, but still physical. What we want in "The Science of Thinking" is not the knowledge of symbols, but the knowledge of that which is symbolized. The chemist does not care