the challenge to the traditional ideal of science 449 



The Modern Drift from the Old Ideal 



Hardly had this sublime synthesis been attained, in the 

 golden age of scholasticism, than forces began to show them- 

 selves which began the work of undermining it. Principal 

 among these was Nominalism, which was, in essence, an attack 

 upon metaphysics, in the name of the individual, regarded as 

 the sole reality, to the detriment of intellectual knowledge by 

 way of universal concepts. If such concepts are merely sub- 

 jective means of ordering acquired knowledge, without any 

 objective reference beyond that which is present in intuitive 

 knowledge of individuals, then such concepts as being, cause, 

 substance, essence, are little more than words. In that case, 

 theology is deprived of its scientific character, and as a conse- 

 quence we find a movement towards either positive theology 

 or towards pietism. Philosophy, thus left to its own resources, 

 and cut off from being, turned either inward, in an endeavor to 

 guarantee its validity from within, thus becoming critical and 

 subjectivist; or turned to the natural sciences for support, the 

 Rationalists trusting above all in mathematics, and the Em- 

 piricists taking physical science as their ideal. With Bacon and 

 Descartes, the break-up of the medieval synthesis, begim by 

 Ockham, is, in essentials, complete; the two main paths to be 

 followed by later thinkers, the inductive and the deductive, the 

 way of analysis and the way of synthesis, have been traced 

 out; and philosophy, formerly the queen of the natural sciences, 

 though the handmaid of theology, came to be more and more 

 dependent on, and subordinate to, natural science. 



Empiricism obviously continues the revolt of the Nominalists 

 against metaphysics; rejecting universal concepts, and reducing 

 the activity of intellect to the ordering and correlating of phe- 

 nomena made known by the senses, it restricts scientific knowl- 

 edge to one only, and that a lower form, of the kinds recog- 

 nised by those of a more metaphysical frame of mind. But 

 Descartes was perhaps even more drastic, mutilating thought 

 at both extremes of the central process of abstraction, its source 

 in sense-experience, and the supreme term into which all con- 



