We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
All candid philosophers, in setting out on their great task of coordinating and criticizing the whole range of human thought, must often feel embarrassed by the limitations of their own knowledge. Their difficulties in dealing with scientific thought have increased very greatly during the last thirty years. For, while science has been rapidly growing more complex and abstruse, philosophers have been tending to require a more intimate knowledge of it. They are no longer interested only in scientific methods (which, it is often assumed, can be studied apart from their applications); they are beginning to find significance in particular propositions and principles. Some of these cannot be comprehended in their entirety by anyone who has not submitted himself to a training so specialized and so severe as to be almost incompatible with the width of outlook that makes the philosopher. Accordingly, philosophers have abandoned all attempts to acquire their knowledge of certain branches of science (particularly physics) from the original memoirs and expository treatises addressed to scientists; they have recourse to interpreters.
page 184 note 1 Of course I, in my humble way an experimenter, do not plead guilty to stupidity. It seems to me that the philosophers are wrong who imagine that reason and logic can lead to the discovery of truth; they are merely ways of justifying and explaining truth to those who have themselves no power of discovery.
page 188 note1 Indeed, if he cared to defend himself from my criticisms he could point to passages in his books which make just the points that I am making here. But they are so unobtrusive that his non-scientific readers miss them.
