An Introduction to Philosophy | Page 7

way. A
revival of learning set in. Men turned first of all to a more independent
choice of authorities, and then rose to the conception of a philosophy
independent of authority, of a science based upon an observation of
nature, of a science at first hand. The special sciences came into being.
But the old tradition of philosophy as universal knowledge remained. If
we pass over the men of the transition period and turn our attention to
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the two
who are commonly regarded as heading the list of the modern
philosophers, we find both of them assigning to the philosopher an
almost unlimited field.
Bacon holds that philosophy has for its objects God, man, and nature,
and he regards it as within his province to treat of "_philosophia
prima_" (a sort of metaphysics, though he does not call it by this name),
of logic, of physics and astronomy, of anthropology, in which he
includes psychology, of ethics, and of politics. In short, he attempts to
map out the whole field of human knowledge, and to tell those who
work in this corner of it or in that how they should set about their task.
As for Descartes, he writes of the trustworthiness of human knowledge,
of the existence of God, of the existence of an external world, of the
human soul and its nature, of mathematics, physics, cosmology,
physiology, and, in short, of nearly everything discussed by the men of
his day. No man can accuse this extraordinary Frenchman of a lack of
appreciation of the special sciences which were growing up. No one in
his time had a better right to be called a scientist in the modern sense of
the term. But it was not enough for him to be a mere mathematician, or
even a worker in the physical sciences generally. He must be all that
has been mentioned above.

The conception of philosophy as of a something that embraces all
departments of human knowledge has not wholly passed away even in
our day. I shall not dwell upon Spinoza (1632-1677), who believed it
possible to deduce a world a priori with mathematical precision; upon
Christian Wolff (1679-1754), who defined philosophy as the
knowledge of the causes of what is or comes into being; upon Fichte
(1762-1814), who believed that the philosopher, by mere thinking,
could lay down the laws of all possible future experience; upon
Schelling (1775-1854), who, without knowing anything worth
mentioning about natural science, had the courage to develop a system
of natural philosophy, and to condemn such investigators as Boyle and
Newton; upon Hegel (1770-1831), who undertakes to construct the
whole system of reality out of concepts, and who, with his immediate
predecessors, brought philosophy for a while into more or less
disrepute with men of a scientific turn of mind. I shall come down quite
to our own times, and consider a man whose conception of philosophy
has had and still has a good deal of influence, especially with the
general public--with those to whom philosophy is a thing to be taken up
in moments of leisure, and cannot be the serious pursuit of a life.
"Knowledge of the lowest kind," says Herbert Spencer, "is
_un-unified_ knowledge; Science is _partially-unified_ knowledge;
Philosophy is _completely-unified_ knowledge." [1] Science, he argues,
means merely the family of the Sciences--stands for nothing more than
the sum of knowledge formed of their contributions. Philosophy is the
fusion of these contributions into a whole; it is knowledge of the
greatest generality. In harmony with this notion Spencer produced a
system of philosophy which includes the following: A volume entitled
"First Principles," which undertakes to show what man can and what
man cannot know; a treatise on the principles of biology; another on the
principles of psychology; still another on the principles of sociology;
and finally one on the principles of morality. To complete the scheme it
would have been necessary to give an account of inorganic nature
before going on to the phenomena of life, but our philosopher found the
task too great and left this out.
Now, Spencer was a man of genius, and one finds in his works many

illuminating thoughts. But it is worthy of remark that those who praise
his work in this or in that field are almost always men who have
themselves worked in some other field and have an imperfect
acquaintance with the particular field that they happen to be praising.
The metaphysician finds the reasonings of the "First Principles" rather
loose and inconclusive; the biologist pays little heed to the "Principles
of Biology"; the sociologist finds Spencer not particularly accurate or
careful in the field of his predilection. He has tried to be a professor of
all the sciences, and it is too late in