Excerpt from The Relation of Science and Philosophy
The aim of the following pages is to investigate the problem of the relation of science and philosophy. With this end in view, it has been found advisable to make an examination of their respective histories. For, when the actual, historical course of those investigations known as science and philosophy is traced, there are unfolded the various relations which each, throughout its long history, has borne to the other. By the same method, likewise, there ought to emerge, as a result of analysis, a definition of science and a definition of philosophy which should be adequate and just to the entire development of each. Definitions formed in any other way can, only by the merest chance, be applicable to the history of disciplines which show such complex developments. Definitions formed in any other way must necessarily be, to some degree, arbitrary, and, as such, will almost inevitably lead to a misunderstanding and even a depreciation of the work of men who have lived in times earlier than and different from our own.
After such an historical survey has been completed, there ought also to result a clearer comprehension of the relation that should exist to-day between science and philosophy, investigations which, as is well known, have in their development exhibited toward each other attitudes varying from that of bitter antipathy to that of friendly and co-operative sympathy.
It is at least theoretically possible that philosophy has to investigate a content quite other than that of the sciences. If this be so however, it surely would be an acceptable service on the part of someone to point out what this content is, - a content which is sometimes vaguely referred to as the phenomena of mind. On the other hand, it may be that the content of philosophy consists in the general processes of the various sciences to which may be added the phenomena of social and religious life, and that its task is to examine and synthesize this ever-growing body of data. Which of these is the genuine task of philosophy it is the aim of this thesis to indicate.
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