perly scrutinized by philosophy. For it is the business of philoso- 

 phy, including herein the scientist's critique of his own progress, 

 not stupidly to deny these nor dogmatically to assert these but to 

 understand them. And furthermore, philosophy must try to com- 

 prehend what the empirical scientist is doing when he takes such 

 concepts the products of his own thinking and posits them as 

 existing independently of his own thinking, a positing which, itself, 

 is still the scientist's own operation. 



In this regard the operation of science has produced a curious 

 puzzle. For, aside from the fact that it often tries to explain the 

 data of its own original start'ng-point as the effects of the action of 

 these hypostasized concepts upon a sensitive organism, i e., the 

 human body, as for example, when it tries to explain sensations 

 and ideas by reference to hypothetical physical and physiological 

 processes aside from this fact, there is this still further one, that 

 science has postulated entities or "realities" as existing indepen- 

 dently of and absolutely different from all human thought. This 

 leads at once to the intricate problem of the idea and the object. 

 If it be granted that such independent realities are totally different 

 from sensations and ideas, then the former can never be known by 

 the latter. It is of course possible to say that such realities are 

 still known be'ng cognized somehow by other processes than those 

 consisting of sensational and ideational categories. It must be 

 freely admitted that this is a view which has generally been held. 

 The rationalistic movement of scholasticism and, specifically, that 

 of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries advanced just such a 

 claim, a claim which Kant however endeavoured to show to be 

 utterly unjustified. But even if such realities could be apprehended 

 in this way by thought, the reply of thousands of idealists, whose 

 views are not to be contemptuously set aside, would be that such 

 realities, therefore, cannot be entirely foreign to thought. Whether 

 such an argument be cogent or not, it is quite manifest that here 

 we have a problem to solve, and, if the solution should turn out to be 

 vain as it has in the attempts t)f the past, we shall then be driven 

 back to the inquiry, how in the first place in the history of scientific 

 thinking we came to predicate such a contraposition of idea and 

 object, a contraposition which, in effect, was an opposition, for idea 

 and object were regarded as utterly different from each other except 



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