THE METAPHYSICAL IN COGNITION.

THE FAUST ATTITUDE IN PHILOSOPHY.

AUST had studied all the sciences, had taken degrees in the

FAUST

four faculties, and become a famous professor in the university. Yet in the monologue with which Goethe opens his grand drama, he stands before us a self-confessed ignoramus, whose lectures are a mere waste of time, since he does not teach things worth knowing, and whose despair reaches its climax in the proclamation of the dreary doctrine that knowledge is impossible. He says:

Goethe's magnificent drama has exercised upon the minds of all civilised nations an influence scarcely less than that of the Bible; and here we are confronted with a statement of the impossibility of scientific research. But if science is vain, what shall we do? Are we not like miners in search of useful and precious metals, groping our way in the dark labyrinth of excavations underground, with the assistance of the lamp of scientific method? If science after all is but vanity, had we not better extinguish our lamp and abandon ourselves to the mercy of circumstances?

The Faust attitude is apt to exercise a baneful influence upon youthful minds who accustom themselves to finding the acme of wisdom in the conclusion that cognition is an unprofitable sport, knowledge vain, and science the empty conceit of a deluded brain.

Faust's words are often quoted in order to give the prestige of Goethe's authority to the agnostic doctrine; but let us bear in mind that we must explain the words of the passage from its context; they contain the exposition of the dramatic plot, embodying Faust's fundamental error from which all his later mistakes arise. Far from being endorsed by Goethe, they are proposed for refutation, and Mephistopheles, behind Faust's back, triumphantly says:

The surrender of science is the way to perdition.

Faust ap

Faust began his studies from the top, not from the bottom. He began with philosophy, and we may well assume that the philosophy he studied consisted of that metaphysical verbiage which regards. knowledge as a comprehension of things-in-themselves. parently imagines that so long as we do not know what things-inthemselves are, all our knowledge remains purely phenomenal and worthless. No wonder that he is desperate, for as he states himself, he "rummages in empty words."

According to the metaphysical method of philosophising we know of gold that it is yellowish or reddish, that it is heavier than other metals, possessing in its pure state a certain specific weight, that it does not corrode, is ductile or malleable, etc.; but all our chemical knowledge avails us nothing unless we understand what the essence of gold is.1 Phenomenal knowledge apparently touches

1 John Locke, one of the soberest philosophers, says: As 'it is plain that the word 'gold' stands in the place of a substance, having the real essence of a species of things made by nature," our notion that gold is something fixed, "is a truth

only the surface of existence, and we are told that what we need is metaphysical knowledge; but metaphysical knowledge can be as little obtained as the blue flower of Wonderland in the hopeless quest of which the knights-errant of yore were busily engaged.

The fatal error of metaphysics is the reification or hypostatisation and substantiation of names. Gold is supposed to be an essence which is in possession of many properties. The properties are knowable, but the essence itself remains unknown. The error is obvious enough: the properties of gold are, in truth, qualities; gold is the sum-total of all its qualities, and we know what gold is, as soon as we know all the qualities of gold.

While metaphysicians mystified themselves and others with things-in-themselves and with the idea of metaphysical knowledge, the investigators in the various branches of science, nothing daunted, continued in their search for truth, and it became an established doctrine of the day that science and philosophy were diametrically opposed. The philosopher looked down upon the scientist, whom he ridiculed for imagining himself in possession of a parcel of truth, while in fact his knowledge was a mere illusion. The scientist on the other hand smiled at the ingenuous pride of the philosopher whose grandiloquent phrases were either the vagaries of dreamers or trivial truisms concealed in the garb of pompous declamations. Some scientists tried to keep in contact with metaphysics, but others cut themselves loose from it, and Kirchhoff, in order to avoid the mysticism into which the metaphysical conception of knowledge is liable to involve a thinker, replaced the term "knowledge" by "description," declaring that the object of mechanics is to describe with exhaustive thoroughness and the greatest attainable simplicity the motions that take place in nature. Professor Mach, born of the same spirit of modern science, independently of Kirchhoff, spoke of

which will always fail us in its particular application, and so is of no real use or certainty. . . . For if we know not the real essence of gold, it is impossible we should know what parcel of matter has that essence, and so whether it be true gold or no." -An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III, vi, 50.

Among the philosophers of the eighteenth century Bishop Berkeley (commonly, and, even by Kant, erroneously regarded as a denier of reality) is the only one who reached the proper conclusion that substance does not exist.

cognition as an imitation or a mental construction of facts-ein Nachbilden der Thatsachen.1

After science and philosophy had separated, science began to split up into innumerable specialities, and philosophy lost itself more and more in the labyrinthian woods of metaphysics. The consequence was that the need of a reconciliation was strongly felt, and approaches were made from both sides to reach an amicable status quo, in order to keep philosophy sound and to preserve the solidarity of all knowledge in the sciences through the establishment of a philosophy of science.

Schopenhauer made an attempt at reconciling metaphysics with the sciences, and he was in many respects very helpful in preparing the way for the positivism of a Philosophy of Science. Nevertheless, he is still a metaphysician and takes his metaphysics seriously, for in the realm of his things-in-themselves nothing is impossible. The "will" is above space and time and can freely choose its own way of acting. Schopenhauer repudiates spiritism, but speaks about spirits, telepathy, clairvoyance, dreams and the dream-organ, the seat of which he believes to have discovered in the sympathetic system (!) in such a way that any medium should be delighted to quote from him. Schopenhauer's reconciliation of metaphysics and science consists in the proposition of a duality of cognition. There is, according to his philosophy, physical knowledge and metaphysical knowledge; the former is accessible to science, but not the latter. Schopenhauer says (W. a. W. u. V., I, pp. 114-117):2

"If we turn to the wide province of natural science, which is divided into many fields, we may, in the first place, make a general division of it into two parts. It is either the description of forms, which I call morphology, or the explanation of changes, which I call atiology. The first treats of the permanent forms, the second

1 See Professor Mach's great work, The Science of Mechanics, his Monist articles, passim, and especially his "Address Delivered Before the General Session of the German Association of Naturalists and Physicians, at Vienna, September 24, 1894," published in The Open Court, Nos. 376 and 377, and in his Popular Scientific Lectures.

2 The quotations refer to the pages of the German edition. The English translation by Haldane and Kemp is full of errors and cannot be used without constant reference to the original.

of the changing matter, according to the laws of its transition from one form to another. ...

"If, however, we surrender ourselves to its teaching, we soon become convinced that ætiology cannot afford us the information we chiefly desire, any more than morphology. . . . It determines, according to law, the order in which the phenomena originate in time and space. But it affords us absolutely no information about the inner nature of any one of these phenomena: this is called Naturkraft or power of nature, and it lies outside the province of causal explanation. The constant uniformity with which manifestations of nature appear whenever their known conditions are present, is called a law of nature. But this law of nature, these conditions, and the real nature of a phenomenon, in a particular place and at a particular time, are all that ætiology knows or even can know. The power of nature itself which manifests itself, the inner nature of the phenomena which appear in accordance with these laws, remains always a secret to it, something entirely strange and unknown in the case of the simplest as well as of the most complex phenomena. For although as yet aetiology has most completely achieved its aim in mechanics, and least completely in physiology, still the force on account of which a stone falls to the ground or one body repels another is, in its inner nature, not less strange and mysterious than that which produces the movements and the growth of an animal. ... Consequently the most complete ætiological explanation of the whole of nature can never be more than an enumeration of forces which cannot be explained, and a reliable statement of the rule according to which phenomena appear in time and space, succeed, and make way for each other. But the inner nature of the forces remains unexplained, because the law which our explanation follows does not extend so far; it is limited to their appearance and succession. In this respect it may be compared to a section of a piece of marble which shows many veins beside each other, but does not allow us to trace the course of veins from the interior of the marble to its surface. Or, if I may use a humorous but more striking comparison, the philosophical investigator, when confronted with the entire ætiology of nature, must always feel like a man who, without knowing how, has dropped into a company quite unknown to him, each member of which in turn presents another to him as his friend and cousin, and therefore as quite well known, yet the man himself, while at each introduction he expresses himself gratified, has always the question on his lips: But how the deuce am I going to get at the whole company?'"

Schopenhauer forgets his own solution of the metaphysical problem. The forces of nature which in their innermost essence appear to us as inaccessible, are nearer to us than we imagine and we know them better and more intimately than anything else, for our own soul is the metaphysical essence of our bodily being and the company of strangers who introduce themselves as their brothers