July 5, 1901.] 



SCIENCE. 



21 



formal, independent of what is in them ; 

 for will and action they are qualitative, in- 

 divisible, inseparable from their content. 

 Again, the scientists reduce causation to 

 mere uniformity of coexistences or se- 

 quences, which is no real causation at all, 

 being only so much passive existence or 

 fatal process ; while will or action is causa- 

 tion, the positive interaction of things that 

 are, the active relation and conservation of 

 what was and is and will be. And, once 

 more, science needs elements, while will or 

 life is the eternal denial of elements or any- 

 thing like them. Says a recent writer : * 

 " It is one of the greatest dangers of our time 

 that the naturalistic (or scientific) point of 

 view, which decomposes the world into 

 elements for the purpose of causal connec- 

 tion, interferes with the volitional point of 

 view of the real life, which can deal only 

 with values and not with elements." Of 

 the danger involved I shall speak in a 

 moment,! but the bondage of science to ele- 

 ments, to thoroughly decomposed reality, 

 is indubitable. And then, in addition to 

 the formal space and time, the empty 

 causality and the unreal elements, that are 

 peculiar to the aloofness of science from 

 life, there are in the special sciences the 

 different ' working hypotheses,' which we 

 found to serve the purposes of protecting 

 conservation against specialism, but which, 

 nevertheless, so long as retaining their 

 projected forms, make science artificial. 

 Science, accordingly, has no choice ; it is 

 condemned to positivism. Even the much- 

 vaunted experience of observation and ex- 

 periment, although our only possible source 

 of knowledge, can never lead to direct 

 knowledge of reality, can never put us face 

 to face with that which is. Even in science 

 we know appearances, not things. 



* See Miinsterherg's 'Psychology and Life,' p. 

 267. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1899. 



t See also Miinsterherg's ' Grundziige der Psycho- 

 logie' in the PsycJiological Review, May, 1901. 



Bat what now is the danger ? The 

 writer quoted above says it is the interfer- 

 ence of the scientific with the volitional 

 point of view. With not less truth, how- 

 ever, it is that the two points of view will 

 not interfere, that both science and life will 

 fail to appreciate, as that writer has failed 

 to appreciate, the true import of their in- 

 congruity, and so will forever stay apart, the 

 one losing itself in a morbid intellectual- 

 ism, the other in a dead monotony of mere 

 existence. Whatever be true about their 

 incongruity, life without science is certainly 

 lifeless ; science without life, meaningless 

 — as meaningless, as empty, as the pro- 

 verbial Greek. We know men who lead 

 what we often abusivelj^ call the double 

 life. They have their science, perhaps 

 their laboratories and their books and 

 their own pet doctrines, and they have also 

 their social affiliations in business, in 

 politics and in religion ; and their life 

 seems double, because their sociology and 

 their business, or their political theory and 

 their party ties, or their biology and their 

 religion, simply will not mix. But is their 

 duplicity as real as it seems? To them, as 

 well as for us looking on, the opposition 

 needs only to grow to make all the science 

 meaningless and all the life dead ; certainly 

 a strange, ineffectual opposition ; a double 

 life, that can be double only in form, only 

 numerically and that must be tedious and 

 unhappy even in its peacefulness. And 

 what more can be said? This. Such du- 

 plicity, the duplicity of science and life as 

 never interfering, is not even possible. Of 

 course scientific technique, with its aloofness 

 and its logical constructions, and life that 

 in its special affairs is only conventional 

 and ritualistic, or say, routine in the study 

 or the laboratory and routine in the church 

 or the market place, can never conflict, but 

 routine is never either real science or real 

 life. Witness the avowed, although some- 

 times forgotten, positivism of technical 



