4 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



sciences are able to acquire any significance for what might 

 be called the science of nature in the most simple form. 

 Unhappily the term " natural philosophy " is restricted in 

 English to theoretical physics. This is not without a high 

 degree of justification, for theoretical physics has indeed lost 

 its naivete and become a philosophy of nature ; but it never- 

 theless is very unfortunate that this use of the term " natural 

 philosophy " is established in this country, as we now have 

 no proper general term descriptive of a natural science that 

 is in permanent relation to philosophy, a natural science 

 which does not use a single concept without justifying it 

 epistemologically, i.e. what in German, for instance, would 

 simply be called " Naturphilosophie." 



Let us call it philosophy of nature ; then we may say 

 that only by becoming a true philosophy of nature are 

 natural sciences of all sorts able to contribute to the highest 

 questions which man's spirit of inquiry can suggest. 



These highest questions themselves are the outcome of 

 the combination of the highest results of all branches of 

 philosophy, just as our philosophy of nature originated in the 

 discussion of the results of all the separate natural sciences. 

 Are those highest questions not only to be asked, are they 

 to be also solved ? To be solved in a way which does not 

 exceed the limits of philosophy as the domain of actual- 

 understanding ? 



The beginning of a long series of studies is not the right 

 place to decide this important question ; and so, for the 

 present certainly, " natural theology ' must remain a prob- 

 lem. In other words : it must remain an open question 

 at the beginning of our studies, whether after all there 

 can be any final general answer, free from contradictions, 



