MODERN SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 85 



MODEKN SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT AND ITS INFLUENCE 



ON PHILOSOPHY 



By Professor HARRY BBAL TORREY 



REED COLLEGE 



TO enter upon a discussion of the influence of modern scientific 

 thought upon philosophy is to find one's self beset by temptations 

 to a discursiveness not possible within the given conditions of time and 

 space. Under such pressure, one might be led easily into a considera- 

 tion of relative values — efficacy of methods, seriousness of limitations, 

 ultimate soundness of criteria, the final significance of present tend- 

 encies. As I write, however, these problems seem so turgid with poten- 

 tial misunderstanding as to embarrass rather than facilitate the dis- 

 cussion that, as a student of biology, I had planned. To avoid such 

 embarrassments, attention will be focused on the general theme through 

 an examination into the nature of scientific truth. This procedure not 

 only will put into my hands an instrument whose uses are relatively 

 familiar to me, but will serve, I believe, to illuminate some of the most 

 significant phases of modern philosophic thought. 

 • Poincare has somewhere made a suggestive comparison between the 

 Gallic and Anglo-Saxon genius. Characteristic of the one is a feeling 

 for form, for symmetry, for logical completeness, for finality; charac- 

 teristic of the other is a feeling for substance, development, function, 

 change. For the one, truth lies in the result; for the other, in the 

 process. One is represented by a deductive, the other by an inductive 

 type of mind. 



I have no desire to raise here a national issue. Whatever the merit 

 of this characterization of these ethnic groups, it will serve my purpose 

 if it give vividness to the statement that the same general differences 

 distinguish certain philosophers and scientific investigators. Wherever 

 one finds a faith in final causes, a hope in the revelation of ultimate 

 truth, there one finds a philosopher who, like the Frenchman of Poincare, 

 has drawn the essential elements of his inspiration from the philosophy 

 characteristic of ancient Greece. Modern science may have supplied 

 his convenience with the telephone and the electric light, the automobile 

 and the thoroughbred, aniline dyes and serum therapy ; but it has done 

 little more. Until he views the truth as nothing final, as existing in 



