CHAPTER IX 



PHILOSOPHICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS 

 OF SCIENCE 



SCIENCE and philosophy must go hand in hand since the 

 problems of organized thought have scientific bearings. 

 Human thinking may be regarded as an outcome of organic 

 evolution and one of the ultimate problems of science is the 

 relation of mind and matter. How a thinking race arose in 

 the course of thousands of years, how thinking men come out 

 of germs during the brief span of individual development, and 

 how the nerve cells of the brain are related to consciousness 

 are problems which the scientist should investigate, even 

 though their investigation leads him within the domain of 

 philosophy. Moreover, the natural sciences rest upon cer- 

 tain fundamental philosophical assumptions such as the 

 theory that all facts of experience may be systematically 

 related, through the principle of adequate causation. The 

 man of science is a philosopher in spite of himself when- 

 ever he attempts to determine the ultimate realities of 

 science. Unless he accepts the naive conception of nature 

 and assumes that the external world is exactly what it seems 

 to the unthinking mind, he finds himself in the grip of 

 philosophy and must acknowledge his affiliation. 



THE FACTS AND KNOWLEDGE OF SCIENCE 



An examination of the facts of natural science, which are 

 commonly assumed to be realities external to ourselves, will 

 illustrate the assumption by science of philosophical hy- 

 potheses. Before proceeding to this examination, let us 

 have in mind the familiar distinction between the subjective 



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