86 Artificial Systems and Terminology of [BOOKI. 



idea of the whole is already made and needs not to be altered. 

 Experience in the higher sense of investigation of nature is 

 rendered impossible by the fact, that we are supposed to know 

 all the ultimate principles of things ; but these ultimate principles 

 of scholasticism are at bottom only words with extremely inde- 

 finite meaning, abstractions obtained by a series of jumps from 

 every-day experience, which has not been tried and refined in 

 the crucible of science, and is therefore worthless ; and the 

 higher the abstraction is raised, the farther it withdraws from 

 the guiding hand of experience, the more venerable and more 

 important do these 'abstracta' appear, and we can finally come 

 to a mutual understanding about them, though again only 

 through figures and metaphors 1 . Science, according to the 

 scholastic method, is a playing with abstract conceptions ; the 

 best player is he who can so combine them together, that the 

 real contradictions are skilfully concealed. On the contrary, 

 the object of true investigation, whether in philosophy or in 

 natural science, is to make unsparing discovery of existing 

 contradictions and to question the facts until our conceptions 

 are cleared up, and if necessary the whole theory and general 

 view is replaced by a better. In the Aristotelian philosophy 

 and in scholasticism facts are merely examples for the illustra- 

 tion of fixed abstract conceptions, but in the real investigation of 

 nature they are the fruitful soil from which new conceptions, 

 new combinations of thought, new theories, and general views 

 spring and grow. The most pernicious feature in scholasticism 

 and the Aristotelian philosophy is the confounding of mere 

 conceptions and words with the objective reality of the things 

 denoted by them ; men took a special pleasure in deducing the 

 nature of things from the original meaning of the words, and 

 even the question of the existence or non-existence of a thing 



1 See the excellent account of the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies 

 and of scholasticism in Albert Lange's ' Geschichte des Materialismus/ 

 second edition, 1874. 



