126 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



harm to the philosophical conception of nature in our 

 times. Philosophy of nature, in its true sense, has been 

 discredited altogether : a period of mere empiricism followed 

 the period of the natural philosophers ; more than that, 

 there was not only the strong endeavour to get empirical 

 knowledge which might have been very useful indeed 

 but there was the conviction that there never could be 

 anything more than mere empirical experience at all. 



Such an opinion is still predominant in our times, and 

 I need only mention the names of Mach, Clifford, Pearson, 

 and Ostwald to remind you of this state of affairs, and to 

 remind you, at the same time, that the men of science who 

 hold the empirical view sketched above are in fact among 

 the best representatives of science in our days. 



Nevertheless, it is my strongest conviction that such a 

 conception of natural sciences is wrong and incomplete, and 

 that the work of Schelling and Hegel was certainly true 

 and valuable so far as its aim went. There can be a 

 philosophy of nature resting on the foundations of criticism, 

 and evolving a real system of nature from reason without 

 the use of uncontrolled imagination ; and there will be 

 such a system some day, there will be a system that really 

 deserves to be called philosophy of nature in the old sense 

 of this term. 



In this country the term " natural philosophy ' has 

 been restricted to mathematical physics, and that is certainly 

 justified in so far as a great part of theoretical physics 

 does in fact rest on principles that are part of a real 

 philosophy of nature, even though physicists might not 

 agree with this statement. But the use of the word 



o 



" natural philosophy " as identical with mathematical 



