i2o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



PEOFESSOE BEOOKS'S PHILOSOPHY 



By Db. EDWARD GLEASON SPAULDING 



PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 



WHEN one examines the development of thought from the time of 

 the early Greeks to the present, one finds that science and 

 philosophy have in general ever kept pace in development and that their 

 relation to each other has always been one of mutual and reciprocal 

 suggestiveness. At certain times, of course, it has been the one, at 

 other times, the other that has been dominant in its influence; but at 

 the beginning, granting this to have occurred among the Greeks, neither 

 was first, for both arose and for a considerable period developed together 

 as an organic whole. The subsequent differentiation of problem and of 

 method, although it can not be denied to have had its incipience in 

 ancient thought, was in almost total abeyance up to the time of the 

 Eenascence, and is, of course, one of the distinguishing characteristics 

 of modern thought. As a result of, or as identical with, this differ- 

 entiation, we have to-day not only the great diversity of special sciences, 

 but, as included in these, we have also bodies of systematic knowledge 

 or " doctrines " which to many seem far removed from the practical 

 and the factual. As good examples of such there may be cited the 

 Hegelian philosophy, non-Euclidean geometry, the theory of assem- 

 blages, etc. However, not only do such bodies of knowledge or "doc- 

 trines " seem to be far removed from an empirical basis, but, more than 

 this, they are often cited as standing in thorough-going opposition to the 

 empirical sciences, and accordingly are frequently treated as pure spec- 

 ulations. To what extent this stigma is a merited one, I will not here 

 discuss, but I shall be content to assert merely that an examination of 

 their development shows clearly that these " doctrines," or whatever 

 they may be called, have grown out of an earlier period of thought in 

 which their progenitors were " near relatives " to the members of the 

 distinctly empirical group. Accordingly, the influence of empiricism is 

 not really lacking in them, but, rather, they are the products of the 

 process of making explicit that which is at least held to be implied or 

 involved in certain systems, philosophical and scientific, which are in 

 direct contact with empirical problems and methods. Thus, as illus- 

 trating this and as forming a well-known and generally accepted in- 

 stance of philosophical development, it may be said that Hegel goes 

 back to Kant, Kant to Hume (in part), Hume to Berkeley, and Berke- 

 ley to Locke; and Locke worked out his philosophy, which concerned 





