100 THE SCIENTIFIC PLAN OF THE CONGRESS 



course, business, and government, and secondly, the philosophy of 

 humanity, divided into that of body and of soul, wherein medicine 

 and athletics belong to the body, logic and ethics to the soul. Nature, 

 on the other hand, was divided into speculative and applied science, 

 - the speculative containing both physics and metaphysics; the 

 applied, mechanics and magic. All this was full of artificial con- 

 structions, and yet still more marked by deep insight into the needs 

 of Bacon's time, and not every modification of later classifiers was 

 logically a step forward. 



Yet modern efforts had to seek quite different methods, and the 

 energies which have been most effective for the ordering of knowledge 

 in the last decades spring unquestionably from the system of Comte 

 and his successors. He did not aim at a system of ramifications; his 

 problem was to show how the fundamental sciences depend on each 

 other. A series was to be constructed in which each member should 

 presuppose the foregoing. The result was a simplicity which is cer- 

 tainly tempting, but this simplicity was reached only by an artificial 

 emphasis which corresponded completely to the one-sidedness of 

 naturalistic thought. It was a philosophy of positivism, the back- 

 ground for the gigantic work of natural science and technique in the 

 last two thirds of the nineteenth century. Comte 's fundamental 

 thought is that the science of Morals, in which we study human nature 

 for the government of human life, is dependent on sociology. Socio- 

 logy, however, depends on biology; this on chemistry; this on 

 physics; this on astronomy; and this finally on mathematics. In this 

 way, all mental and moral sciences, history and philology, jurispru- 

 dence and theology, economics and politics, are considered as socio- 

 logical phenomena, as dealing with functions of the human being. 

 But as man is a living organism, and thus certainly falls under 

 biology, all the branches of knowledge from history to ethics, from 

 jurisprudence to aesthetics, can be nothing but subdivisions of biology. 

 The living organism, on the other hand, is merely one type of the 

 physical bodies on earth, and biology is thus itself merely a depart- 

 ment of physics. But as the earthly bodies are merely a part of the 

 cosmic totality, physics is thus a part of astronomy; and as the whole 

 universe is controlled by mathematical laws, mathematics must be 

 superordinated to all sciences. 



But there followed a time which overcame this thinly disguised 

 example of materialism. It was a time when the categories of the 

 physiologist lost slightly in credit and the categories of the psycho- . 

 legist won repute. This newer movement held that it is artificial to 

 consider ethical and logical life, historic and legal action, literary and 

 religious emotions, merely as physiological functions of the living 

 organism. The mental life, however necessarily connected with brain 

 processes, has a positive reality of its own. The psychical facts repre- 



