An introduction to philosophy / by J.L. Stocks.

  • John Leofric Stocks
Date:
1929
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: An introduction to philosophy / by J.L. Stocks. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    any direct qualitative judgment, by the mere fact that its existence presupposes the fulfilment of more com- plex conditions. It will naturally follow, in a world of experience co-ordinated by space and time, that the lowest stratum is to be found present everywhere, while the higher strata occur intermittently. A good example of this stratification is the soul, or principle of life, present in plants and equally, but in greater perfection, in man. The basis here is the continuous and unintermittent performance of certain organic functions on which life depends. On this basis is built in the animal world the more intermittent activities of sensation and desire, on which, again, in man are built activities still rarer and more intermit- tent than these—thought and will. Plato and Aris- totle argued that the life-principle and, equally, the empirical world as a whole, is to be understood as the cradle or nurse of the highest that finds place in it. There v/as in their day a line of inquiry which took the opposite direction, which sought to exhibit the higher as the necessary resultant of arrangements or configurations of the lower. They maintained that this was no explanation; that it at least needed cor- rection from the other point of view, and when so corrected would represent no more than a subordinate element in the total account; that the interpretation of the lower in terms of the higher was the road to philosophical understanding. These two alternative modes of interpretation are still with us. The one, which starts from the lowest and simplest and most omnipresent, is the method of science; and will necessarily be that of a realistic philosophy so far as it continues the work of science; the other, which starts from the highest and empiri- cally rarest, is characteristic of the idealist tradition. The pride of place, which falls on this view to mind, falls on the other to the atom or to some yet simpler and more pervasive entity, such as space-time. For the scientist, man lies a long way down the road, and