Introduction to science / by Alex Hill.

  • Alexander Hill
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introduction to science / by Alex Hill. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of science to investigate it. It is the duty of the man of science to adopt such tests as Faraday adopted—to fix a false top to a table, with a manometer between it and the original top—and to show that the fingers which were sup¬ posed to resist the temptation to push, exercised the exact amount of force required to move the table ; to devise the “ control experiment” which has baffled so many clair¬ voyants ; to search the files of telegrams until Madame Blavatsky’s communications with India are found to be transmitted by no agency more marvellous than the electric telegraph. It is not for the man of science to adopt an attitude of either credulity or incredulity. Into the world of consciousness he, as man of science, does not claim admis¬ sion ; but matter and force are within his province, and his duty to investigate all phenomena which they exhibit is not in any way affected by the pretended mystery of the agencies which evoke them. The Relation of Philosophy to Science. — In considering the boundaries of science, we have already anticipated some of the reflections to which this subject naturally gives rise ; and we shall now be obliged, owing to the uncertainty of definition of the term philosophy, to return to some extent over the ground already traversed. In the present day the term philosophy is used in a re¬ lative sense. Herbert Spencer describes it as “ know¬ ledge of the highest degree of generality.” The search for knowledge which is absolutely general has been abandoned. Since pure thought, independent of any par¬ ticular application, depends upon absolute knowledge, it also is a logical fiction. It is the process of abstraction carried to the power of n. Absolute thought would be no thought, the sleep of the intellect; just as absolute knowledge would be no knowledge, ignorance : Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. It is easy to show, with Leibnitz and Locke, that, however far thought may be removed from the basis of observation upon which it started, its independence of observation is only a question of degree.
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