The ethic of freethought : and other addresses and essays / by Karl Pearson.

  • Karl Pearson
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The ethic of freethought : and other addresses and essays / by Karl Pearson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    33/454 (page 15)
    axiom without which it is impossible for any knowledge, any thought, to exist, namely: “ The same set of causes always produces precisely the same effect.” That is the very essence of the creed of freethought, and the rule by which every man practically guides his conduct. What is the nature of this Law, this ordered outcome of cause in effect ? Obviously it is not a finite changeable thing, it is absolute, infinite, inde¬ pendent of all conceptions of time or change, or particular groups of finite things. Hence it is what we have been seek¬ ing as the relation between finite and infinite. It is that which binds together the individual and the universe, giving him a necessary place in its life. Law makes his ‘ becoming 5 a necessary part of the ‘ becoming ’ of the universe; neither could exist without the other. Knowledge, therefore, of the relation of the finite to the infinite is a knowledge of law. Eeligion according to the definition I have given you to-night is law,1 2 and the mission of freethought is to spread acquired knowledge and gain new knowledge of this lawk Let me strive to explain my meaning more clearly by an example. Supposing you were to grant me the truth of the principles of gravitation and the conservation of energy as applied to the planetary system. Then I should be able to tell you, almost to the fraction of a second, the exact rate of motion and the position at a given time of each and all the planetary bodies. Kay, I might go further, and describe the ‘ becoming ’ of each individual planet, its loss of external motion, motion of translation and rotation; then, too, its loss of internal motion, motion of vibration, or heat, etc. All this would follow necessarily from the principles you had granted me, and the complicated work of mathematical analysis would be verified by observation. Kow note, every step of that mathematical analysis follows a definite law of thought, one step does not follow another chaotically, but of absolute logical 1 A fact dimly grasped by the Jews, and even suggested by the Latin r digio. 2 [I should now-a-days place the necessity of causation in the first place in the thinker, neither in phenomena nor in ‘ things-in-themselves. ’ The possibility of a conceptual model being devised to fit perceptual experience I should now attribute to the correlated growths of the perceptual and rational faculties.]