THE CHALLENGE TO THE TRADITIONAL IDEAL OF SCIENCE 453 



cartes to exist between ideas and reality by a subjective co- 

 ordinating of sense-impressions by means of innate forms and 

 functions, and for the unifying role of the idea of being sub- 

 stitutes an imaginary point of reference in " consciousness in 

 general." The concept of the universe as a cosmos, however, 

 was held, both by Hume and by Kant, to be unfounded. The 

 unity of the universe, and its order, are primarily those of law, 

 and especially causal law. Hume claimed to show that causal 

 laws are nothing more than subjective associations of per- 

 ceived facts; and Kant concluded that the universe in itself is 

 unknowable, and that what we call the order of nature is in 

 fact only the correlation of phenomena in our own subjective 

 world of experience. The intellect must abandon its pretence 

 of knowing the nature of reality; the order and unity on which 

 it feeds are found only in the mental world, and are its own 

 production. This implies, however, that intellect must be re- 

 garded as essentially a logical faculty, and paves the way for 

 the glorification of logical reason in the system of Hegel. Here 

 the notion of science is patterned above all on logic, with 

 stress on the deductive phases of thought, but to the neglect 

 of the sources of knowledge in concrete experience. The Posi- 

 tivists were logical enough in repudiating such a purely logical 

 ideal, and could claim the authority of Kant for regarding 

 natural science as the only real science, so that philosophy, in 

 so far as it is a science, must be identified with some general 

 aspect of natural science. 



Although the main trend of European thought from Des- 

 cartes to the nineteenth century considered man primarily as 

 one who is capable of scientific thought, especially mathematics 

 and natural science, yet from the start of this period voices 

 were raised in protest against this tendency, as being one-sided, 

 and in fact a depersonalization of the real man. Hardly had 

 Descartes put forward his mathematical angelicism, than Pas- 

 cal pointed out the insufficiency of philosophy, and claimed 

 that truth is grasped rather by the heart, by an affective intu- 

 ition rising up from the soul of man, than by logical or scientific 

 reason. The rationalism of Leibniz was offset by the humanism 



