Part 21

The empirical character (and the practical character in the sense already established) of the natural sciences is commonly admitted in the case of such of them as consist in classifications of facts: for example, of zoology, botany, mineralogy, and also of chemistry, in so far as it enumerates chemical species, and of physics, in so far as it enumerates classes of phenomena or physical forces. The universals of all these sciences are quite arbitrary, for it is impossible to find an exact boundary between the concept of animal (the universal of zoology) and that of vegetable (the universal of botany). Indeed it is impossible to find one between the living and the not living, the organic and the material. Finally, the cellule, which is, for the present at any rate, the highest concept of the biological sciences, is differentiated from chemical facts only in an external way. It will be objected that there is in any case no lack of attempts to determine strictly the supreme concepts of the sciences, such, for instance, as those that place the _atom_ at the beginning of all things and attempt to show each individual fact as nothing but a different aggregate of atoms. There are also those who mount to the concept of _ether_ or of _energy_ and declare all individual facts to be nothing but different forms of energy. Or finally, the vitalists recognize as irreducible the two concepts of the teleological and the mechanical, of organic and inorganic, of life and matter. But in all these cases _the natural sciences are deserted,_ phenomena are abandoned for noumena, and philosophic explanations are offered. These may or may not have value, but they are of no use from the point of view of the natural sciences, or at most ensure to some professor the insipid pleasure of calling an animal "a complex of atoms," heat "a form of energy," and the cellule "vital force."

[Sidenote: _Impossibility of introducing into them strict divisions._]

Since the natural sciences cannot be unified in a concept (hence their ineradicable _plurality_), and therefore remain unsystematic, a mass of sciences without close relation among themselves, logical distinctions are not possible in any science. No one will ever be able to prove that genera and species must be so many and no more, or describe the truly original character by which one genus may be distinguished from another genus and one species from another species. The animal species hitherto described have been calculated it over four hundred thousand, and those that may yet be described as fifteen millions. These numbers simply express the impotence of the empirical sciences to exhaust the infinite and individual forms of the real and the necessity in which they are placed of stopping at some sort 1 of number, of some hundreds, of some thousands, or of some millions. Those species, however few or many they may be, flow one into the other owing to the undeniable conceivability of graduated, indeed of continuous intermediate forms, which made evident the arbitrariness of the clean cut made into fact by separating the wolf from the dog or the panther from the leopard.

[Sidenote: _Laws in the natural sciences, and so called prevision._]

But some doubt is manifested where we pass from classification and description or from _system_ (as the lack of system of naturalistic classifications is called, by a curious verbal paradox) to the consideration of the laws that are posited in those sciences. It is then perceived that the classification is certainly a simple labour of preparation, arbitrary, convenient, and nominalistic, but that the true end of the natural sciences is not the class but the _law._ In the compass of the law strict accuracy of its truth is indubitable; so much so that by means of laws it is actually possible to make _previsions_ as to what will happen. This is indeed a miraculous power, which places the natural sciences above every form of knowledge, and endows them with an almost magical force, by means of which man, not contented with knowing what has happened (which is yet so difficult to know), is capable of knowing even what has not yet happened, what will happen, or the future! _Prevision_(there must be a clear understanding of the concepts) is equivalent to _seeing beforehand or prophesying,_ and the naturalist is thus neither more nor less than a clairvoyant.

[Sidenote: _Empirical character of naturalistic laws._]

The miraculous nature of this boasted power should suffice to make us doubt whether the law is truly what it is said to be, a strict truth, quite different from the empirical concept, from the class, and from the description. In reality, the law is nothing but the empirical concept itself, the description, class or type, of which we have just spoken. In philosophy law is a synonym for the pure concept; in the empirical or natural sciences it is a synonym for the empirical concept; hence laws are sometimes called _empirical_ laws, or laws of experience. If they were not empirical, they would not be naturalistic, but philosophic universals, which, as we have seen, are unfruitful in the field of the natural sciences. The law of the wolf is the empirical concept of the wolf: granted that in reality there is found one part of the representation corresponding to that concept, it is possible to conclude that the rest is also found. Thus Cuvier (to choose a very trite example), arranging the types of animals and hence the laws of the correlations of organs, was able to reconstruct from one surviving bone the complete fossil animal. In like manner, granted the chemical concept of water, H2O, and given so much of oxygen and double that quantity of hydrogen, O and H2, and submitting the two bodies to the other conditions established by chemistry, it is possible to conclude that water will be seen to appear. All naturalistic laws are of this type. Certain naturalists and theorists have reasonably protested against the division of the natural sciences into descriptive and explicative, sciences of classification and sciences of laws, and have maintained that all have one common character, namely, law. But this is not because the law is superior to the class or to the empirical concept, but because the two things are identical: the law is the empirical concept and the empirical concept is the law.

[Sidenote: _The postulate of the uniformity of nature, and its meaning._]

The postulate of the _constancy or uniformity of nature_ is the base of _empirical laws or concepts._ This, too, is something mysterious, before which many are ready to bow, seized with reverence and sacred terror. But that postulate is not even an hypothesis, somehow conceivable, though not yet explained and demonstrated. Ordinary thought, like philosophical thought, knows that reality is neither constant nor uniform, and indeed that it is perpetually being transformed, evolving and becoming. That constancy and uniformity, which is postulated and falsely believed to be objective reality, is the same _practical necessity_ which leads to the neglect of differences and to the looking upon the different as uniform, the changeable as constant. The postulate of the uniformity of nature is the demand for a treatment of reality made uniform for reasons of convenience. _Natura non facit saltus_ means: _mens non facit saltus in naturae cogitatione,_ or, better still, _memoriae usus saltus naturae cohibet._

[Sidenote: _Pretended inevitability of natural laws._]

Another consequence of this is the inversion of the assertion (to be found everywhere in the rhetoric of the natural sciences) as to the _inexorability and inevitability_ of the laws of nature. Those laws, precisely because they are arbitrary constructions of our own and give the movable as fixed, are not only not inevitable and do sometimes afford exceptions; but there _is_ absolutely _no real fact,_ which is not an _exception_ to its naturalistic law. By coupling a wolf and a she-wolf we obtain a wolf cub, which will in time become a new wolf, with the appearance, the strength, and the habits of its parents. But this wolf will not be identical with its parents. Otherwise how could wolves ever evolve with the evolution of the whole of reality, of which they are an indivisible part? By chemical analysis of a litre of water we obtain H2O; but if we again combine H2O, the water that we obtain is only in a way of speaking the same as before. For that combining and recombining must have produced some modification (even though not perceived by us), and in any case changes have occurred in reality in the subsequent moment, from which the water is not separable, and therefore in the water itself taken in its concreteness. We could consequently give the following definition: the _inexorable_ laws of nature are those that _are violated at every moment,_ while philosophic laws are by definition those that are _at every moment observed._ But in what way they are observed cannot be known, save by means of history, and therefore true knowledge knows nothing of previsions; it knows only facts that have really happened; of the future there can be no knowledge. The natural sciences, which do not furnish real knowledge, have, if possible, even less right (if one may speak thus) to talk of previsions.

Yet, it will be objected, it is a fact that we all form previsions, and that without them we should neither be able to cook an egg nor to take one step out of doors. That is quite true, but those alleged previsions are merely the summary of what we know by experience to have happened, and according to which we resolve upon our action. We know what has happened. We do not know, nor do we need to know, what will happen. Were any one truly to wish to know it, he would no longer be able to move and would be seized with such perplexity before life, that he would kill himself in desperation or die of fear. The egg, which usually takes five minutes to cook in the way that suits my taste, sometimes surprises me by presenting itself to my palate after those five minutes, either as too much or too little cooked; the step taken out of doors is sometimes a fall on the threshold. Nevertheless, the knowledge of this does not prevent me from leaving the house and cooking the egg, for I must walk and take nourishment. The laws of my individual being, of my temperament, of my aptitudes, of my forces, that is, the knowledge of my past, make me resolve to undertake a journey, as I did twenty years ago, to begin work upon a statue, as I did ten years ago. Alas! I had not considered that in the meantime my legs have lost their strength and my arm has begun to tremble. By all means call the previsions made use of in these cases true or false; but do not forget that they are nothing but empirical concepts, that is to say, mnemonic devices, founded upon historical judgments. There can be no doubt that they are useful; indeed, what we maintain is that just because they are useful, they are not true. If they possess any truth, it resides in the establishment of the fact. That is to say, it does not reside in the prevision and in the law, but in the historical judgment which forms its basis.

[Sidenote: _Nature and its various meanings. Nature as passivity and negativity._]

Having thus made clear the coincidence of empirical concepts and the natural sciences, we must determine exactly the meaning of the word "natural," which is used as qualifying these sciences. It has not seemed advisable to change it, since its use is so deeply rooted, although we have, on the other hand, already given its synonym in qualifying these sciences as "empirical." What is _nature_? The first meaning of "nature" is the "opposite" of "spirit," and designates the natural or material moment in relation to the spiritual, the mechanical in relation to the teleological moment, the negative moment in relation to the positive. Thus, in the transition from one form of the spirit to another, the inferior form is like matter, ballast, or obstacle, and so is the negation of the superior form. Hence reality is imagined as the strife of two forces, the one spiritual and the other material or natural. It is superfluous to repeat that the two forces are not two, but one, and that if the negative moment were not, the positive moment could not be. The pigeon (says Kant), which rises to take flight, may believe that had it not to vanquish the resistance of the air, it would fly still better. But the fact is that without that resistance, it would fall to earth. In this sense, there is no science of Nature (of matter, passivity, negation, etc.) distinguishable from that of Spirit, which is the science of itself and of its opposite, and the science of itself only in so far as it is also the science of its opposite.

[Sidenote: _Nature as practical activity._]

But in another sense, _nature_ is, not indeed the opposite of spirit, but something distinct _in_ the spirit, and especially distinct from the cognitive spirit, as that form of spirituality and activity which is not cognitive. A non-theoretical activity, a spirituality which should not be in itself knowledge, cannot be anything but the _practical_ form of the spirit, the will. _Man makes himself nature_ at every moment, because at every moment he passes from knowing to willing and doing and from willing and doing returns to knowing, which is the basis for new will and action. In this sense, the science of nature, or the philosophy of nature, could not be anything but the philosophic science of the will, the Philosophy of the practical.

[Sidenote: _Nature in the gnoseological sense, as naturalistic or empirical method._]

The natural sciences have nothing to do with a philosophic knowledge of nature as will, with a Philosophy of the practical. They are, as has already been said, not knowledge of will, but will; not truth, but utility. In consequence of this, they extend to the whole of reality, theoretic and practical, to the products of the theoretic spirit, not less than to those of the practical spirit; and without knowing any of them, universally or individually, they manipulate and classify them all in the way we have seen. They have not therefore a _special object,_ but _a special mode of treatment,_ their object or matter being the presupposed philosophic-historical knowledge of the real. They do not treat of the material and mechanical aspect of the real, nor even of its non-theoretical, practical, volitional aspect (or what is incorrectly called the irrational aspect of it). They turn the theoretical into the practical, and by killing its theoretic life, make it dead, material, and mechanical. Nature, matter, passivity, motion _ab extra,_ the inert atom and so on, are not reality and concepts, but natural science itself in action. Mechanism, logically considered, is neither a fact nor a mode of knowing the fact. It is a non-fact, a mode of not-knowing: a practical creation, which is real only in so far as it becomes itself an object of knowledge. This is the _gnoseological_ or _gnoseopractical_ meaning of the word "nature," a meaning which must be kept carefully distinct from the two preceding meanings. When we speak, for instance, of _matter_ or of _nature_ as not existing, we mean to refer to the puppet of the naturalists, which the naturalists themselves and the philosophers of naturalism, forgetting its genesis, take for a real if not a living being. That matter (said Berkeley) is an abstraction; it is (say we) an empirical concept, and whoever knows what empirical concepts are will not pretend that matter or nature exists, simply because it is spoken about.

[Sidenote: _The illusions of materialists and dualists._]

We do not claim to have supplied the full solution of the problem concerning the dualism or materialism of the real with this discussion on the theme of Logic. This solution cannot (we repeat) be expected, save from all the philosophic sciences together, that is to say, from the complete system. But we can already see, from the logical point of view, that the dualists and materialists cannot avoid the task of showing that the nature or matter, which they elevate to a principle of the real or to one of the two principles of the real, is not: firstly, the mere negation of the spirit, nor secondly, a form of the spirit, nor thirdly, the abstraction of the natural sciences. They must also show that it answers to something conceivable and existing, outside or above the spirit. Logic can pass onward at this point, saying of materialists and dualists what Dante said of the devils and the damned struggling in the lake of burning pitch: "And we leave them thus encompassed."

[Sidenote: _Nature as empirical distinction of an inferior in relation to a superior reality._]

The word "nature" has yet a fourth meaning (but this time altogether empirical), which is clear in those propositions which distinguish natural life from social life, natural men _(Naturmenschen)_ or savages from civilized men, and again natural from human beings, animals from men, and so on. Nature, in this sense, is distinguished from civilization or humanity, and thus the sole reality is divided into two classes of beings: natural beings and human beings (which are sometimes also called spiritual as compared with the former, which are called material). The vague and empirical nature of this distinction is at once perceived from the impossibility that we meet with of assigning boundaries between civilization and the state of nature, between humanity and animality. Man can be only empirically distinguished from the animal, the animal from the vegetable, and vegetables from inorganic beings, which are organic in their own way. Certainly, what are called _things_ are not organic, for example a mountain or a plough-share; but they are not organic, because they are not real, but aggregates, that is to say, empirical concepts. In the same way, a forest is not organic, though it is composed of things vegetating, nor a crowd, though composed of men. When we treat of things in the above sense, we can say with some mathematicians that _things_ do not exist, but only their _relations._ Hence if the dualists feel able to affirm that the two classes of beings, natural and human, are based upon the existence of two different substances and upon the different proportions of these in each of the two classes, the task of proving the thinkability of the two substances and the different proportions of the compound falls upon them.

[Sidenote: _The naturalistic method and the natural sciences as extended to superior not less than to inferior reality._]

The distinction between nature and spirit being therefore, in this last sense, altogether empirical, it is clear that the natural sciences (in the gnoseological or gnoseopractical sense in which we give chem this name) are not restricted to the development of knowledge relating to what is called inferior reality, from the animal downwards, leaving to the sciences of the spirit the knowledge that relates to superior reality from the animal upwards, that is to say, to man. Sciences of nature and sciences of the spirit, _orbis naturalis_ and _orbis intellectuals,_ are also, in this case, partitions and convenient groupings. All do substantially the same thing, that is to say, they provide one single homogeneous practical treatment of knowledge.

[Sidenote: _Demand for such an extension, and effective existence of what is demanded._]

On this unity and homogeneity is based the demand so often made (especially in the second half of the nineteenth century) for the extension of _the method of the natural sciences_ to the sciences of the spirit or moral sciences, the _orbis intellectualis,_ for a naturalistic treatment of the productions of language and of art, or of political, social, and religious life. Thus were originated or prophesied a Psychology, an Æsthetic, an Ethic, a Sociology, _methodo naturali demonstratae._ It was necessary to draw the attention of those makers of programmes and advisers (apart from the evil philosophic intentions, positivist or materialistic, which they nourished in their bosoms) to the superfluity of their demand, and gently to reprove them with the old phrase: _Quod petis in manu habes._ Since man was man and constructed pseudoconcepts and empirical sciences, these naturalistic classifications have never been limited to animals, plants, and minerals, nor to physical, chemical, and biological phenomena, but have been extended to all the manifestations of reality. Naturalistic Logic, Psychology, Linguistic Sociology and Ethics have not awaited the nineteenth century ere they should open to the sun. And (without going too far back in time, or leaving Europe) they already bore flower and fruit in the Sociology (Politics) of Aristotle, in the Grammatics of the Alexandrians, in the Poetics and Rhetoric of Aristotle himself, or of Hermagoras, of Cicero, or of Quintilian, and so on. The novelty of the nineteenth century has principally consisted in giving the names _social Physics,_ or the _physico-acoustic science of language_ to what was once more simply, and perhaps in better taste, called otherwise. But in saying this we do not wish to deny that certain naturalistic work has been far more copious in the nineteenth century than in Greece, and that naturalistic methods have not been applied with singular acumen and exactitude in those fields of study. Linguistic affords a case in point, with _its phonetic laws,_ by reason of which it moves so proudly among its companions.

[Sidenote: _Historical basis of the natural sciences._]

The natural sciences and the empirical concepts which compose them appear therefore like a tachygraphic transcription upon living and mutable reality, capable of complete transcription only in terms of individual representations. But upon what reality? Upon the reality of the poet, or upon the clarified and existentialized reality of--the historian? The constructions of the natural sciences take history for their presupposition, just as judgments of classification take individual judgments. Were this not so, their economic function would have no way of expressing itself, from lack of matter whereon to work. To employ the easy example already given, it would be of no use to the zoologist to construct types and classes of animals that were certainly conceivable, but non-existent. For while those types and classes would distract the attention from the useful and urgent task of summarizing reality historically given and known, they would not exhaust the possibilities, which are infinite And if it appear that imaginary animals are sometimes classified, as for example griffins centaurs, Pegasi, and sirens, it is easy to see that this is not done in Zoology, but in another naturalistic science,--comparative Mythology, in which not animals but the imaginings of men are really classified. These too are historical facts, because they are imaginings or fancies historically given. They are not combinations of images which no people has ever dreamed of, nor any poet represented, for such, as has already been said, would be infinite in number and food for mere diversion.

[Sidenote: _The question as to whether history is the foundation or the crown of thought._]