THE RESULTS OF ABSTRACTION IN SCIENCE. 825 



by invalid reasoning, and that the sanction of a name so eminent 

 among American physiologists should be given to views which do not 

 accord with the results of the best and most recent investigations on 

 this subject. 



* 



THE RESULTS OF ABSTRACTION IN SCIENCE. 



By CHAELES T. HAVILAND. 



THE old scholastic controversy as to the reality of universals has 

 its analogue in modern times. Formerly the strife had its reli- 

 gious implications, and it was from the arsenal of theology that the 

 defenders of realism procured their weapons. Theological realism 

 has now been virtually abandoned, and it is to metaphysics that the 

 realists appeal to defend their abstractions from the searching analysis 

 to which scientific modes of thought would most assuredly subject 

 them. 



Realism was the doctrine that universals have a real existence, en- 

 tirely independent of the concretes from which they were generalized. 

 It was held, for instance, by the older realists, that there is in the uni- 

 verse a perfect circle, freed from the imperfections of those we are 

 able to construct ; that this is not an idea generalized from the circles 

 we see ; that it is not the result of abstracting the imperfections that 

 are inseparable from any circle we can draw and confining our atten- 

 tion alone to its perfections ; but that there really exists an archetype 

 of which circles as we know them are merely imperfect reproductions. 

 This doctrine, even among the scholastics, found its strong opponents, 

 and in its cruder forms was obliged to succumb. In metaphysics, how- 

 ever, realism, in a more refined form, found a soil fitted to its luxuriant 

 growth, and the belief in entities and quiddities, and the other meta- 

 physical essences associated with these, spread to such an extent that 

 the successive influences of men as powerful as Locke and Hume suf- 

 ficed to check rather than to exterminate it. The scientific tendency 

 of thought, in which these men were pioneers, is now making havoc 

 among the heirlooms of a past civilization. This tendency, which 

 accepts nothing on mere assertion, and which forces every belief to 

 produce its credentials, is now bringing its methods to bear upon the 

 entities of metaphysics, and proving conclusively that they are of no 

 nobler descent than the phenomena in which they originated. 



The decadence of realism affords so striking an example of the 

 general change in the conception of nature that has taken place within 

 the past three centuries as, to a certain extent, to justify Comte's gen- 

 eralization as to the natural development of thought. ' There could, 

 historically, hardly be a better example of this change than in the con- 



