Section F.— EDUCATION, HISTORY, xMENTAL SCIENCE, 

 POLITICAL ECONOMY. GENERAL SOCIOLOGY, 

 AND STATISTICS. 



President of the Section: — Professor T. M. Forsyth, 



M.A., D.Phil. 



FRIDAY. JULY 12. 



The President delivered the following address : 



The Section of oiir Association of which I have the honour 

 to be President at this year's meeting may not untitly be called 

 the Philosophical Section of the Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science ; and when one who pro'fesses Philosophy as 

 his subject of study and teaching is given the task of delivering 

 a Presidential Address, it is also not unfitting that he should 

 try to say something about the relations between Philosophy and 

 Science, and the question whether Philosophy has any part in the 

 advancement of knowledge. 



That a section of the work of the Association includes 

 Mental Science as one of its divisions indicates that the " ancient 

 quarrel '' between science and philosophy is in process of being 

 allayed. But the process is a slow one, and it is worth while 

 to do even a very little in the way of trying to make the two 

 seem less foreign to each other. To' some minds it seems more 

 important to distinguish philo.sophy and science than to relate 

 them. If the mind concerned is a scientific mind, this attitude 

 i? apt to take the form of denying to philosophy a place in the 

 system ctf knowledge altogether. It mav be exemplified, perhaps, 

 hy a remark which I remember reading in one of the books of 

 my own science teacher at Edinburgh, Professor Tait. After 

 quoting a pas.sage — on the nature of space, I think — ifrom the 

 philosopher Kant, he says : " The reader will have no difticalty 

 in distinguishing the truth from the metaphysics in this passage." 

 Taken just as it stands, this means that philosophy, as such, is 

 inherently false. When, on the other hand, the distinction 

 between philosophy and science is insisted on by a philosophical 

 mind, the attitude, even if it should be true and, moreover, not 

 at all meant to be depreciatory of science, is one that is apt, 

 in the first instance at least, still further to alienate the scientist 

 from philosophy. My own mind has always run rather in the 

 direction of bringing them together. 



The first step towards bringing phi4osophy and science 

 together is the apprehension that science has not a monc^poly 

 of the experiential method, or the endeavour to keep true to 

 actual experience. Granted that philosophy has often erred 

 through hasty generalization and equally hasty application of 

 general principles to experiential details, it has none the less 

 always been its effort, when it has been true to itself, to express 



