F. F. EOGETj ON ERNEST NAVILLE^S LIFE. 



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enabled him to build up on a solid foundation the rights of 

 philosophy to scientific rank and the rights of science to 

 philosophic treatment. 



We can state his position in a few words. According to him, 

 actual or real knowledge is never gained by forming simple 

 deductions upon the basis of a idviori data of the purely 

 rational order. But, on the other hand, sciences are not either 

 built up, as has often been claimed, by the mere ascertainment 

 of facts. In whatever sphere, science springs up from the 

 moment only when an explanation of the facts is reached, and 

 science is science in the measure in which that explanation 

 accounts for the facts and is unfailingly borne out by their 

 repetition. Now, the terms of this explanation, whence can 

 they spring up, if not from the mind of which they are a 

 spontaneous act ? The mind clothes those terms in hypothetical 

 forms. The explanation is a supposition, and this has to be 

 scrutinised before the mind, which brought it forth, may commit 

 itself more or less completely and more or less finally to it. 



Philosophy has no other method than this. Philosophy at 

 its barest is indistinguishable from the scientific mind process. 

 Philosophy is in reality nothing else than the scientific mind 

 process brought to bear no longer upon some limited or defined 

 problem, but upon the universal problem, that is, the problem of 

 the Universe. There is in the reason of man a craving for 

 unity which belongs to the very kernel of reason. Philosophy 

 is the expression, the satisfaction of this want. It formulates 

 a general explanation of all that exists. It puts and endeavours 

 to solve the following question : " How should the principium 

 be conceived in order to understand that a world such as ours 

 could proceed therefrom, our world with the diverse elements 

 which compose it and the relations in which they stand to one 

 another ? " 



Well, for ISTaville, only three answers are possible, and all 

 three have been over and again put forward in the course of the 

 centuries and their conflicts make up the history of human 

 thought. The first, by far the most feeble, is materialism which 

 would bring all things and beings down to mechanical effects. 

 To defeat this system, it should be sufficient to lay bare its 

 inability to explain the existence of the very faculties by which 

 the mind perceives the presence of matter and recognises its 

 properties. To quote the humorous expression which terminates 

 the discourse addressed by Naville to the students of Switzer- 

 land on the occasion of his jubilee : " If matter existed alone, 

 materialism could not be." 



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