THE CHALLENGE TO THE TRADITIONAL IDEAL OF SCIENCE 455 



freedom, personality and responsibility which it effectively 

 denied, and against positivism for identifying reason as such 

 with the causal and deterministic instrument it had become in 

 the hands of the scientists. Reason has other uses besides that 

 of the cold calculations of the mathematicians or the correlating 

 of physical facts. More emphasis was being placed on the cul- 

 tural sciences, on art, morality, religion; and the recent rise 

 of two new sciences was to have a profound effect on subse- 

 quent thought. History, now cultivated as a fundamental sci- 

 ence, was to teach men to see things against a background of 

 temporal process, as relative to it, and as conditioned by cir- 

 cumstances of time and place. Biology was to lead men to 

 interpret reality in terms of life, especially when scientific 

 evolutionism would show how both history and biology could 

 combine to present an over-all picture of a dynamic universe. 

 Evolutionism taught men to regard the universe no longer as a 

 hierarchy built of essentially different levels of being, but as a 

 process, in which there is a continuity of forms, evolving one 

 from the other, and as a flux in which one can no longer dis- 

 tinguish immutable essences. Even thought is subject to similar 

 changes, and systems of thought are seen as necessarily relative 

 to the particular conditions of the mind in which they are born 

 and of the civilization within which they are developed. It was 

 but natural that Historicism should make its appearance, with 

 Dilthey, denying any absolute truth, and seeing philosophies 

 as expressions of historical periods and of recurring types of 

 mentalities; and that the various philosophies of life — Nietzsche, 

 Bergson, James — should reject the claims of the speculative 

 intellect in favor of those of life, or movement, or action. With 

 such authors, Irrationalism, at least in the sense of anti- 

 rationalism, takes its place as a philosophy in our modern world. 

 The new attitude found a premature voice in Kierkegaard, 

 in whom we find the revolt against Hegelianism, against the 

 domination of human life by science, and against the notion 

 of philosophy as a system of truths. Instead, he sought to 

 introduce once more the individual, the real existent thing, as 

 a category into thinking. He expressly rejected the Greek 



