time: the refreshing river 



development had to go; and the AristoteHan concepts of causation, 

 of the four elements, of form and matter, of qualities and entities; 

 the Galenic concepts of virtues and humours, were inconsistent with 

 it. It was no chance that science was called then and for long after- 

 wards, "natural philosophy." But we have litde reason for supposing 

 that any improvement on the philosophy which grew up with the 

 scientific movement is now for ever impossible. 



One thing at least is clear; it is impossible for a scientist to have 

 no philosophy at all. The freer from it he thinks he is, the more 

 surely he is in the grip of some unconscious system, perhaps a garbled 

 form of idealism which he received as a virus in the milk of the religion 

 on which he was nourished as a child.^ Purity of science in this sense 

 is an illusion. In the christian western democracies, theological ideal- 

 isms of various kinds have long overlain the materialism of primitive 

 Christianity. One might almost take leave to doubt whether the 

 philosophy of dialectical materialism is more dominating in the minds 

 of Soviet scientists, than the mystical idealism of Sir Arthur Eddington 

 and Sir James Jeans in the minds of British scientists who firmly 

 believe themselves to have no philosophy at all. But if one must 

 have a philosophy, let it be a good one, congruent with the scientist's 

 experience of nature. The dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, 

 the organic mechanism of Whitehead,^ the emergent evolutionism of 

 Lloyd-Morgan^ and Smuts,* the temporal realism of Alexander,^ the 

 evolutionary naturalism of Sellars,^ and many other writers; all these 



^ Cf. the words of Engels: 



"Scientists imagine that they can free themselves from philosophy by ignoring 

 or disdaining it. But as they are unable to move a step without tliought, and thought 

 demands logical definitions, the only result is that they take these definitions 

 uncritically either from the current ideas of so-called educated people, dominated 

 by hang-overs from philosophical systems long since decayed, or else from their 

 random and uncritical reading of all kinds of philosophical works. In fact, they 

 prove themselves the prisoners of philosophy, but unfortunately on most occasions, 

 of philosophy of die worst sort. Thus while they are most violent in their contempt 

 for philosophy they become the slaves of the most vulgarised relics of the worst 

 philosophical systems." (Dialectics of Nature, Gesamtausgabe edition, Moscow, 

 1935, P- 624.) 

 ^ See another essay in this book, p. 178. 



^ Gifford Lectures, Emergent Evolution and Life, Mind and Spirit (London, 1923 

 and 1926). It is interesting that Lenin in his Materialism and Empiric-Criticism {Works, 11, 

 p.* 244), approved of Lloyd-Morgan's earlier work, in which he attacked the Machian, 

 Karl Pearson. 



* Holism and Evolution (London, 1926). 

 ^ Space, Time and Deity (London, 1927). 

 ^ Evolutionary Naturalism (Chicago, 1922). 



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