TRUTH 



conception spread very widely during the nineteenth 

 century, particularly in the second half, among the 

 rapidly advancing sciences; it was favored by the 

 specialism which grew up in the necessary division of 

 labor. The majority of scientists are still of opinion 

 that their task is confined to the exact observation and 

 description of facts. All that goes beyond this, and 

 especially all far-reaching philosophic conclusions from 

 their accumulated observations, are regarded by them 

 with suspicion. Rudolph Virchow strongly emphasized 

 this narrow empirical tendency ten years ago. In his 

 speech on the foundation of the Berlin University he 

 explained the "transition from the philosophic to the 

 scientific age"; he said that the sole aim of science is 

 "the knowledge of facts, the objective investigation of 

 natural phenomena in detail." The former politician 

 seemed to forget that he had maintained a precisely 

 opposite view forty years before (at Wurtzburg), and 

 that his own great achievement, the creation of cellular 

 pathology, was a philosophic construction — the forma- 

 tion of a new and comprehensive theory of disease by 

 the combination of countless observations and the con- 

 clusions deduced therefrom. 



No science of any kind whatever consists solely in the 

 description of observed facts. Hence we can only regard 

 it as a pitiful contradiction in terms when we find biology 

 classed in official documents to-day as a "descriptive 

 science," and physics opposed to it as an "explanatory 

 science." As if in both cases we had not, after de- 

 scribing the observed phenomena, to pass on to trace 

 them to their causes — that is, to explain them — by means 

 of rational inferences! But it is even more regrettable 

 to find that one of the ablest scientists of Germany, 

 Gustav Kirchhoif, has claimed that description is the 

 final and the highest task of science. The famous dis- 

 coverer of spectrum analysis says in his Lectures on 



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