Chapter IX — Science and Philosophy

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

In the present lecture, it is my object to consider some reactions of science upon the stream of philosophic thought during the modern centuries with which we are concerned. I shall make no attempt to compress a history of modern philosophy within the limits of one lecture. We shall merely consider some contacts between science and philosophy, in so far as they lie within the scheme of thought which it is the purpose of these lectures to develop. For this reason the whole of the great German idealistic movement will be ignored, as being out of effective touch with its contemporary science so far as reciprocal modification of concepts is concerned. Kant, from whom this movement took its rise, was saturated with Newtonian physics, and with the ideas of the great French physicists—such as Clairaut, for instance—who developed the Newtonian ideas. But the philosophers who developed the Kantian school of thought, or who transformed it into Hegelianism, either lacked Kant’s background of scientific knowledge, or lacked his potentiality of becoming a great physicist if philosophy had not absorbed his main energies.