International Congress of Arts and Science Part 30

Luther, the greatest thought-stirrer of them all, practically of the same generation with Copernicus, Leonardo, and Columbus, does not come in as a scientific investigator, but as the great loosener of chains which had so fettered the intellect of men that they dared not think otherwise than as the authorities thought.

Almost coeval with the advent of these intellects was the invention of printing with movable type. Gutenberg was born during the first decade of the century, and his a.s.sociates and others credited with the invention not many years afterward. If we accept the principle on which I am basing my argument, that we should a.s.sign the first place to the birth of those psychic agencies which started men on new lines of thought, then surely was the fifteenth the wonderful century.

Let us not forget that, in a.s.signing the actors then born to their places, we are not narrating history, but studying a special phase of evolution. It matters not for us that no university invited Leonardo to its halls, and that his science was valued by his contemporaries only as an adjunct to the art of engineering. The great fact still is that he was the first of mankind to propound laws of motion. It is not for anything in Luther's doctrines that he finds a place in our scheme. No matter for us whether they were sound or not. What he did toward the evolution of the scientific investigator was to show by his example that a man might question the best-established and most venerable authority and still live--still preserve his intellectual integrity--still command a hearing from nations and their rulers. It matters not for us whether Columbus ever knew that he had discovered a new continent. His work was to teach that neither hydra, chimera, nor abyss--neither divine injunction nor infernal machination--was in the way of men visiting every part of the globe, and that the problem of conquering the world reduced itself to one of sails and rigging, hull and compa.s.s. The better part of Copernicus was to direct man to a viewpoint whence he should see that the heavens were of like matter with the earth. All this done, the acorn was planted from which the oak of our civilization should spring.

The mad quest for gold which followed the discovery of Columbus, the questionings which absorbed the attention of the learned, the indignation excited by the seeming vagaries of a Paracelsus, the fear and trembling lest the strange doctrine of Copernicus should undermine the faith of centuries, were all helps to the germination of the seed--stimuli to thought which urged it on to explore the new fields opened up to its occupation. This given, all that has since followed came out in regular order of development, and need be here considered only in those phases having a special relation to the purpose of our present meeting.

So slow was the growth at first that the sixteenth century may scarcely have recognized the inauguration of a new era. Torricelli and Benedetti were of the third generation after Leonardo, and Galileo, the first to make a substantial advance upon his theory, was born more than a century after him. Only two or three men appeared in a generation who, working alone, could make real progress in discovery, and even these could do little in leavening the minds of their fellow men with the new ideas.

Up to the middle of the seventeenth century an agent which all experience since that time shows to be necessary to the most productive intellectual activity was wanting. This was the attraction of like minds, making suggestions to each other, criticising, comparing, and reasoning. This element was introduced by the organization of the Royal Society of London and the Academy of Sciences of Paris.

The members of these two bodies seem like ingenious youth suddenly thrown into a new world of interesting objects, the purposes and relations of which they had to discover. The novelty of the situation is strikingly shown in the questions which occupied the minds of the incipient investigators. One natural result of British maritime enterprise was that the aspirations of the Fellows of the Royal Society were not confined to any continent or hemisphere. Inquiries were sent all the way to Batavia to know "whether there be a hill in Sumatra which burneth continually, and a fountain which runneth pure balsam." The astronomical precision with which it seemed possible that physiological operations might go on was evinced by the inquiry whether the Indians can so prepare that stupefying herb Datura that "they make it lie several days, months, years, according as they will, in a man's body without doing him any harm, and at the end kill him without missing an hour's time." Of this continent one of the inquiries was whether there be a tree in Mexico that yields water, wine, vinegar, milk, honey, wax, thread, and needles.

Among the problems before the Paris Academy of Sciences those of physiology and biology took a prominent place. The distillation of compounds had long been practiced, and the fact that the more spirituous elements of certain substances were thus separated naturally led to the question whether the essential essences of life might not be discoverable in the same way. In order that all might partic.i.p.ate in the experiments, they were conducted in open session of the Academy, thus guarding against the danger of any one member obtaining for his exclusive personal use a possible elixir of life. A wide range of the animal and vegetable kingdom, including cats, dogs, and birds of various species, were thus a.n.a.lyzed. The practice of dissection was introduced on a large scale. That of the cadaver of an elephant occupied several sessions, and was of such interest that the monarch himself was a spectator.

To the same epoch with the formation and first work of these two bodies belongs the invention of a mathematical method which in its importance to the advance of exact science may be cla.s.sed with the invention of the alphabet in its relation to the progress of society at large. The use of algebraic symbols to represent quant.i.ties had its origin before the commencement of the new era, and gradually grew into a highly developed form during the first two centuries of that era. But this method could represent quant.i.ties only as fixed. It is true that the elasticity inherent in the use of such symbols permitted of their being applied to any and every quant.i.ty; yet, in any one application, the quant.i.ty was considered as fixed and definite. But most of the magnitudes of nature are in a state of continual variation; indeed, since all motion is variation, the latter is a universal characteristic of all phenomena. No serious advance could be made in the application of algebraic language to the expression of physical phenomena until it could be so extended as to express variation in quant.i.ties, as well as the quant.i.ties themselves. This extension, worked out independently by Newton and Leibnitz, may be cla.s.sed as the most fruitful of conceptions in exact science. With it the way was opened for the unimpeded and continually accelerated progress of the last two centuries.

The feature of this period which has the closest relation to the purpose of our coming together is the seemingly unending subdivision of knowledge into specialties, many of which are becoming so minute and so isolated that they seem to have no interest for any but their few pursuers. Happily science itself has afforded a corrective for its own tendency in this direction. The careful thinker will see that in these seemingly diverging branches common elements and common principles are coming more and more to light. There is an increasing recognition of methods of research, and of deduction, which are common to large branches, or to the whole of science. We are more and more recognizing the principle that progress in knowledge implies its reduction to more exact forms, and the expression of its ideas in language more or less mathematical. The problem before the organizers of this Congress was, therefore, to bring the sciences together, and seek for the unity which we believe underlies their infinite diversity.

The a.s.sembling of such a body as now fills this hall was scarcely possible in any preceding generation, and is made possible now only through the agency of science itself. It differs from all preceding international meetings by the universality of its scope, which aims to include the whole of knowledge. It is also unique in that none but leaders have been sought out as members. It is unique in that so many lands have delegated their choicest intellects to carry on its work.

They come from the country to which our republic is indebted for a third of its territory, including the ground on which we stand; from the land which has taught us that the most scholarly devotion to the languages and learning of the cloistered past is compatible with leaders.h.i.+p in the practical application of modern science to the arts of life; from the island whose language and literature have found a new field and a vigorous growth in this region; from the last seat of the holy Roman Empire; from the country which, remembering a monarch who made an astronomical observation at the Greenwich Observatory, has enthroned science in one of the highest places in its government; from the peninsula so learned that we have invited one of its scholars to come and tell us of our own language; from the land which gave birth to Leonardo, Galileo, Torricelli, Columbus, Volta--what an array of immortal names!--from the little republic of glorious history which, breeding men rugged as its eternal snow-peaks, has yet been the seat of scientific investigation since the day of the Bernoullis; from the land whose heroic dwellers did not hesitate to use the ocean itself to protect it against invaders, and which now makes us marvel at the amount of erudition compressed within its little area; from the nation across the Pacific, which, by half a century of unequaled progress in the arts of life, has made an important contribution to evolutionary science through demonstrating the falsity of the theory that the most ancient races are doomed to be left in the rear of the advancing age--in a word, from every great centre of intellectual activity on the globe I see before me eminent representatives of that world-advance in knowledge which we have met to celebrate. May we not confidently hope that the discussions of such an a.s.semblage will prove pregnant of a future for science which shall outs.h.i.+ne even its brilliant past?

Gentlemen and scholars all! You do not visit our sh.o.r.es to find great collections in which centuries of humanity have given expression on canvas and in marble to their hopes, fears, and aspirations. Nor do you expect inst.i.tutions and buildings h.o.a.ry with age. But as you feel the vigor latent in the fresh air of these expansive prairies, which has collected the products of human genius by which we are here surrounded, and, I may add, brought us together; as you study the inst.i.tutions which we have founded for the benefit, not only of our own people, but of humanity at large; as you meet the men who, in the short s.p.a.ce of one century, have transformed this valley from a savage wilderness into what it is to-day--then may you find compensation for the want of a past like yours by seeing with prophetic eye a future world-power of which this region shall be the seat. If such is to be the outcome of the inst.i.tutions which we are now building up, then may your present visit be a blessing both to your posterity and ours by making that power one for good to all mankind. Your deliberations will help to demonstrate to us and to the world at large that the reign of law must supplant that of brute force in the relations of the nations, just as it has supplanted it in the relations of individuals. You will help to show that the war which science is now waging against the sources of diseases, pain, and misery offers an even n.o.bler field for the exercise of heroic qualities than can that of battle. We hope that when, after your all too fleeting sojourn in our midst, you return to your own sh.o.r.es, you will long feel the influence of the new air you have breathed in an infusion of increased vigor in pursuing your varied labors. And if a new impetus is thus given to the great intellectual movement of the past century, resulting not only in promoting the unification of knowledge, but in widening its field through new combinations of effort on the part of its votaries, the projectors, organizers, and supporters of this Congress of Arts and Science will be justified of their labors.

DIVISION A--NORMATIVE SCIENCE

DIVISION A--NORMATIVE SCIENCE

SPEAKER: PROFESSOR JOSIAH ROYCE, Harvard University

(_Hall 6, September 20, 10 a. m._)

THE SCIENCES OF THE IDEAL

BY JOSIAH ROYCE

[Josiah Royce, Professor of History of Philosophy, Harvard University, since 1892. b. Gra.s.s Valley, Nevada County, California, November 20, 1855. A.B. University of California, 1875; Ph.D. Johns Hopkins 1878; LL.D. University of Aberdeen, Scotland; LL.D. Johns Hopkins. Instructor in English Literature and Logic, University of California, 1878-82. Instructor and a.s.sistant Professor, Harvard University, 1882-92. Author of _Religious Aspect of Philosophy_; _History of California_; _The Feud of Oakfield Creek_; _The Spirit of Modern Philosophy_; _Studies of Good and Evil_; _The World and the Individual_; _Gifford Lectures_; and numerous other works and memoirs.]

I shall not attempt, in this address, either to justify or to criticise the name, normative science, under which the doctrines which const.i.tute this division are grouped. It is enough for my purpose to recognize at the outset that I am required, by the plans of this Congress, to explain what scientific interests seem to me to be common to the work of the philosophers and of the mathematicians. The task is one which makes severe demands upon the indulgence of the listener, and upon the expository powers of the speaker, but it is a task for which the present age has well prepared the way. The spirit which Descartes and Leibnitz ill.u.s.trated seems likely soon to become, in a new and higher sense, prominent in science. The mathematicians are becoming more and more philosophical. The philosophers, in the near future, will become, I believe, more and more mathematical. It is my office to indicate, as well as the brief time and my poor powers may permit, why this ought to be so.

To this end I shall first point out what is that most general community of interest which unites all the sciences that belong to our division.

Then I shall indicate what type of recent and special scientific work most obviously bears upon the tasks of all of us alike. Thirdly, I shall state some results and problems to which this type of scientific work has given rise, and shall try to show what promise we have of an early increase of insight regarding our common interests.

I

The most general community of interest which unites the various scientific activities that belong to our division is this: We are all concerned with what may be called ideal truth, as distinct from physical truth. Some of us also have a strong interest in physical truth; but none of us lack a notable and scientific concern for the realm of ideas, viewed as ideas.

Let me explain what I mean by these terms. Whoever studies physical truth (taking that term in its most general sense) seeks to observe, to collate, and, in the end, to control, facts which he regards as external to his own thought. But instead of thus looking mainly without, it is possible for a man chiefly to take account, let us say, of the consequences of his own hypothetical a.s.sumptions--a.s.sumptions which may possess but a very remote relation to the physical world. Or again, it is possible for such a student to be mainly devoted to reflecting upon the formal validity of his own inferences, or upon the meaning of his own presuppositions, or upon the value and the interrelation of human ideals. Any such scientific work, reflective, considerate princ.i.p.ally of the thinker's own constructions and purposes, or of the constructions and purposes of humanity in general, is a pursuit of ideal truth. The searcher who is mainly devoted to the inquiry into what he regards as external facts, is indeed active; but his activity is moulded by an order of existence which he conceives as complete apart from his activity. He is thoughtful; but a power not himself a.s.signs to him the problems about which he thinks. He is guided by ideals; but his princ.i.p.al ideal takes the form of an acceptance of the world as it is, independently of his ideals. His dealings are with nature. His aim is the conquest of a foreign realm. But the student of what may be called, in general terms, ideal truth, while he is devoted as his fellow, the observer of outer nature, to the general purpose of being faithful to the verity as he finds it, is still aware that his own way of finding, or his own creative activity as an inventor of hypotheses, or his own powers of inference, or his conscious ideals, const.i.tute in the main the object into which he is inquiring, and so form an essential aspect of the sort of verity which he is endeavoring to discover. The guide, then, of such a student is, in a peculiar sense, his own reason. His goal is the comprehension of his own meaning, the conscious and thoughtful conquest of himself. His great enemy is not the mystery of outer nature, but the imperfection of his reflective powers. He is, indeed, as unwilling as is any scientific worker to trust private caprices. He feels as little as does the observer of outer facts, that he is merely noting down, as they pa.s.s, the chance products of his arbitrary fantasy.

For him, as for any scientific student, truth is indeed objective; and the standards to which he conforms are eternal. But his method is that of an inner considerateness rather than of a curiosity about external phenomena. His objective world is at the same time an essentially ideal world, and the eternal verity in whose light he seeks to live has, throughout his undertakings, a peculiarly intimate relation to the purposes of his own constructive will.

One may then sum up the difference of att.i.tude which is here in question by saying that, while the student of outer nature is explicitly conforming his plans of action, his ideas, his ideals, to an order of truth which he takes to be foreign to himself--the student of the other sort of truth, here especially in question, is attempting to understand his own plans of action, that is, to develop his ideas, or to define his ideals, or else to do both these things.

Now it is not hard to see that this search for some sort of ideal truth is indeed characteristic of every one of the investigations which have been grouped together in our division of the normative sciences. Pure mathematics shares in common with philosophy this type of scientific interest in ideal, as distinct from physical or phenomenal truth. There is, to be sure, a marked contrast between the ways in which the mathematician and the philosopher approach, select, and elaborate their respective sorts of problems. But there is also a close relation between the two types of investigation in question. Let us next consider both the contrast and the a.n.a.logy in some of their other most general features.

Pure mathematics is concerned with the investigation of the logical consequences of certain exactly stateable postulates or hypotheses--such, for instance, as the postulates upon which arithmetic and a.n.a.lysis are founded, or such as the postulates that lie at the basis of any type of geometry. For the pure mathematician, the truth of these hypotheses or postulates depends, not upon the fact that physical nature contains phenomena answering to the postulates, but solely upon the fact that the mathematician is able, with rational consistency, to state these a.s.sumed first principles, and to develop their consequences.

Dedekind, in his famous essay, "Was Sind und Was Sollen die Zahlen,"

called the whole numbers "freie Schopfungen des Menschlichen Geistes;"

and, in fact, we need not enter into any discussion of the psychology of our number concept in order to be able to a.s.sert that, however we men first came by our conception of the whole numbers, for the mathematician the theory of numerical truth must appear simply as the logical development of the consequences of a few fundamental first principles, such as those which Dedekind himself, or Peano, or other recent writers upon this topic, have, in various forms, stated. A similar formal freedom marks the development of any other theory in the realm of pure mathematics. Pure geometry, from the modern point of view, is neither a doctrine forced upon the human mind by the const.i.tution of any primal form of intuition, nor yet a branch of physical science, limited to describing the spatial arrangement of phenomena in the external world.

Pure geometry is the theory of the consequences of certain postulates which the geometer is at liberty consistently to make; so that there are as many types of geometry as there are consistent systems of postulates of that generic type of which the geometer takes account. As is also now well known, it has long been impossible to define pure mathematics as the science of quant.i.ty, or to limit the range of the exactly stateable hypotheses or postulates with which the mathematician deals to the world of those objects which, ideally speaking, can be viewed as measurable.

For the ideally defined measurable objects are by no means the only ones whose properties can be stated in the form of exact postulates or hypotheses; and the possible range of pure mathematics, if taken in the abstract, and viewed apart from any question as to the value of given lines of research, appears to be identical with the whole realm of the consequences of exactly stateable ideal hypotheses of every type.

One limitation must, however, be mentioned, to which the a.s.sertion just made is, in practice, obviously subject. And this is, indeed, a momentous limitation. The exactly stated ideal hypotheses whose consequences the mathematician develops must possess, as is sometimes said, sufficient intrinsic importance to be worthy of scientific treatment. They must not be trivial hypotheses. The mathematician is not, like the solver of chess problems, merely displaying his skill in dealing with the arbitrary fictions of an ideal game. His truth is, indeed, ideal; his world is, indeed, treated by his science as if this world were the creation of his postulates a "freie Schopfung." But he does not thus create for mere sport. On the contrary, he reports a significant order of truth. As a fact, the ideal systems of the pure mathematician are customarily defined with an obvious, even though often highly abstract and remote, relation to the structure of our ordinary empirical world. Thus the various algebras which have been actually developed have, in the main, definite relations to the structure of the s.p.a.ce world of our physical experience. The different systems of ideal geometry, even in all their ideality, still cl.u.s.ter, so to speak, about the suggestions which our daily experience of s.p.a.ce and of matter give us. Yet I suppose that no mathematician would be disposed, at the present time, to accept any brief definition of the degree of closeness or remoteness of relation to ordinary experience which shall serve to distinguish a trivial from a genuinely significant branch of mathematical theory. In general, a mathematician who is devoted to the theory of functions, or to group theory, appears to spend little time in attempting to show why the development of the consequences of his postulates is a significant enterprise. The concrete mathematical interest of his inquiry sustains him in his labors, and wins for him the sympathy of his fellows. To the questions, "Why consider the ideal structure of just this system of object at all?" "Why study various sorts of numbers, or the properties of functions, or of groups, or the system of points in projective geometry?"--the pure mathematician in general, cares to reply only, that the topic of his special investigation appears to him to possess sufficient mathematical interest. The freedom of his science thus justifies his enterprise. Yet, as I just pointed out, this freedom is never mere caprice. This ideal interest is not without a general relation to the concerns even of common sense. In brief, as it seems at once fair to say, the pure mathematician is working under the influence of more or less clearly conscious philosophical motives. He does not usually attempt to define what distinguishes a significant from a trivial system of postulates, or what const.i.tutes a problem worth attacking from the point of view of pure mathematics. But he practically recognizes such a distinction between the trivial and the significant regions of the world of ideal truth, and since philosophy is concerned with the significance of ideas, this recognition brings the mathematician near in spirit to the philosopher.

Such, then, is the position of the pure mathematician. What, by way of contrast, is that of the philosopher? We may reply that to state the formal consequences of exact a.s.sumptions is one thing; to reflect upon the mutual relations, and the whole significance of such a.s.sumptions, does indeed involve other interests; and these other interests are the ones which directly carry us over to the realm of philosophy. If the theory of numbers belongs to pure mathematics, the study of the place of the number concept in the system of human ideas belongs to philosophy.

Like the mathematician, the philosopher deals directly with a realm of ideal truth. But to unify our knowledge, to comprehend its sources, its meaning, and its relations to the whole of human life, these aims const.i.tute the proper goal of the philosopher. In order, however, to accomplish his aims, the philosopher must, indeed, take account of the results of the special physical science; but he must also turn from the world of outer phenomena to an ideal world. For the unity of things is never, for us mortals, anything that we find given in our experience.

You cannot see the unity of knowledge; you cannot describe it as a phenomenon. It is for us now, an ideal. And precisely so, the meaning of things, the relation of knowledge to life, the significance of our ideals, their bearing upon one another--these are never, for us men, phenomenally present data. Hence the philosopher, however much he ought, as indeed he ought, to take account of phenomena, and of the results of the special physical sciences, is quite as deeply interested in his own way, as the mathematician is interested in his way, in the consideration of an ideal realm. Only, unlike the mathematician, the philosopher does not first abstract from the empirical suggestions upon which his exact ideas are actually based, and then content himself merely with developing the logical consequences of these ideas. On the contrary, his main interest is not in any idea or fact in so far as it is viewed by itself, but rather in the interrelations, in the common significance, in the unity, of all fundamental ideas, and in their relations both to the phenomenal facts and to life! On the whole, he, therefore, neither consents, like the student of a special science of experience, to seek his freedom solely through conformity to the phenomena which are to be described; nor is he content, like the pure mathematician, to win his truth solely through the exact definition of the formal consequences of his freely defined hypotheses. He is making an effort to discover the sense and the unity of the business of his own life.

It is no part of my purpose to attempt to show here how this general philosophical interest differentiates into the various interests of metaphysics, of the philosophy of religion, of ethics, of aesthetics, of logic. Enough--I have tried to ill.u.s.trate how, while both the philosopher and the mathematician have an interest in the meaning of ideas rather than in the description of external facts, still there is a contrast which does, indeed, keep their work in large measure asunder, namely, the contrast due to the fact that the mathematician is directly concerned with developing the consequences of certain freely a.s.sumed systems of postulates or hypotheses; while the philosopher is interested in the significance, in the unity, and in the relation to life, of all the fundamental ideals and postulates of the human mind.

Yet not even thus do we sufficiently state how closely related the two tasks are. For this very contrast, as we have also suggested, is, even within its own limits, no final or perfectly sharp contrast. There is a deep a.n.a.logy between the two tasks. For the mathematician, as we have just seen, is not evenly interested in developing the consequences of any and every system of freely a.s.sumed postulates. He is no mere solver of arbitrary ideal puzzles in general. His systems of postulates are so chosen as to be not trivial, but significant. They are, therefore, in fact, but abstractly defined aspects of the very system of eternal truth whose expression is the universe. In this sense the mathematician is as genuinely interested as is the philosopher in the significant use of his scientific freedom. On the other hand, the philosopher, in reflecting upon the significance and the unity of fundamental ideas, can only do so with success in case he makes due inquiry into the logical consequences of given ideas. And this he can accomplish only if, upon occasion, he employs the exact methods of the mathematician, and develops his systems of ideal truth with the precision of which only mathematical research is capable. As a fact, then, the mathematician and the philosopher deal with ideal truth in ways which are not only contrasted, but profoundly interconnected. The mathematician, in so far as he consciously distinguishes significant from trivial problems, and ideal systems, is a philosopher. The philosopher, in so far as he seeks exactness of logical method, in his reflection, must meanwhile aim to be, within his own limits, a mathematician. He, indeed, will not in future, like Spinoza, seek to reduce philosophy to the mere development, in mathematical form, of the consequences of certain arbitrary hypotheses. He will distinguish between a reflection upon the unity of the system of truth and an abstract development of this or that selected aspect of the system. But he will see more and more that, in so far as he undertakes to be exact, he must aim to become, in his own way, and with due regard to his own purposes, mathematical; and thus the union of mathematical and philosophical inquiries, in the future, will tend to become closer and closer.

II

So far, then, I have dwelt upon extremely general considerations relating to the unity and the contrast of mathematical and philosophical inquiries. I can well conceive, however, that the individual worker in any one of the numerous branches of investigation which are represented by the body of students whom I am privileged to address, may at this point mentally interpose the objection that all these considerations are, indeed, far too general to be of practical interest to any of us.

Of course, all we who study these so-called normative sciences are, indeed, interested in ideas, for their own sakes--in ideas so distinct from, although of course also somehow related to, phenomena. Of course, some of us are rather devoted to the development of the consequences of exactly stated ideal hypotheses, and others to reflecting as we can upon what certain ideas and ideals are good for, and upon what the unity is of all ideas and ideals. Of course, if we are wise enough to do so, we have much to learn from one another. But, you will say, the a.s.sertion of all these things is a commonplace. The expression of the desire for further mutual cooperation is a pious wish. You will insist upon asking further: "Is there just now any concrete instance in a modern type of research which furnishes results such as are of interest to all of us?

Are we actually doing any productive work in common? Are the philosophers contributing anything to human knowledge which has a genuine bearing upon the interests of mathematical science? Are the mathematicians contributing anything to philosophy?"

These questions are perfectly fair. Moreover, as it happens, they can be distinctly answered in the affirmative. The present age is one of a rapid advance in the actual unification of the fields of investigation which are included within the scope of this present division. What little time remains to me must be devoted to indicating, as well as I can, in what sense this is true. I shall have still to deal in very broad generalities. I shall try to make these generalities definite enough to be not wholly unfruitful.

We have already emphasized one question which may be said to interest, in a very direct way, both the mathematician and the philosopher. The ideal postulates, whose consequences mathematical science undertakes to develop, must be, we have said, significant postulates, involving ideas whose exact definition and exposition repay the labor of scientific scrutiny. Number, s.p.a.ce, continuity, functional correspondence or dependence, group-structure--these are examples of such significant ideas; the postulates or ideal a.s.sumptions upon which the theory of such ideas depends are significant postulates, and are not the mere conventions of an arbitrary game. But now what const.i.tutes the significance of an idea, or of an abstract mathematical theory? What gives an idea a worthy place in the whole scheme of human ideas? Is it the possibility of finding a physical application for a mathematical theory which for us decides what is the value of the theory? No, the theory of functions, the theory of numbers, group theory, have a significance which no mathematician would consent to measure in terms of the present applicability or non-applicability of these theories in physical science? In vain, then, does one attempt to use the test of applied mathematics as the main criticism of the value of a theory of pure mathematics. The value of an idea, for the sciences which const.i.tute our division, is dependent upon the place which this idea occupies in the whole organized scheme or system of human ideas. The idea of number, for instance, familiar as its applications are, does not derive its main value from the fact that eggs and dollars and star-cl.u.s.ters can be counted, but rather from the fact that the idea of numbers has those relations to other fundamental ideas which recent logical theory has made prominent--relations, for instance, to the concept of order, to the theory of cla.s.ses or collections of objects viewed in general, and to the metaphysical concept of the self.

Relations of this sort, which the discussions of the number concept by Dedekind, Cantor, Peano, and Russell have recently brought to light--such relations, I say, const.i.tute what truly justified Gauss in calling the theory of numbers a "divine science." As against such deeper relations, the countless applications of the number concept in ordinary life, and in science, are, from the truly philosophical point of view, of comparatively small moment. What we want, in the work of our division of the sciences, is to bring to light the unity of truth, either, as in mathematics, by developing systems of truth which are significant by virtue of their actual relations to this unity, or, as in philosophy, by explicitly seeking the central idea about which all the many ideas cl.u.s.ter.

Now, an ancient and fundamental problem for the philosophers is that which has been called the problem of the categories. This problem of the categories is simply the more formal aspect of the whole philosophical problem just defined. The philosopher aims to comprehend the unity of the system of human ideas and ideals. Well, then, what are the primal ideas? Upon what group of concepts do the other concepts of human science logically depend? About what central interests is the system of human ideals cl.u.s.tered? In ancient thought Aristotle already approached this problem in one way. Kant, in the eighteenth century, dealt with it in another. We students of philosophy are accustomed to regret what we call the excessive formalism of Kant, to lament that Kant was so much the slave of his own relatively superficial and accidental table of categories, and that he made the treatment of every sort of philosophical problem turn upon his own schematism. Yet we cannot doubt that Kant was right in maintaining that philosophy needs, for the successful development of every one of its departments, a well-devised and substantially complete system of categories. Our objection to Kant's over-confidence in the virtues of his own schematism is due to the fact that we do not now accept his table of categories as an adequate view of the fundamental concepts. The efforts of philosophers since Kant have been repeatedly devoted to the task of replacing his scheme of categories by a more adequate one. I am far from regarding these purely philosophical efforts made since Kant as fruitless, but they have remained, so far, very incomplete, and they have been held back from their due fullness of success by the lack of a sufficiently careful survey and a.n.a.lysis of the processes of thought as these have come to be embodied in the living sciences. Such concepts as number, quant.i.ty, s.p.a.ce, time, cause, continuity, have been dealt with by the pure philosophers far too summarily and superficially. A more thoroughgoing a.n.a.lysis has been needed. But now, in comparatively recent times, there has developed a region of inquiry which one may call by the general name of modern logic. To the const.i.tution of this new region of inquiry men have princ.i.p.ally contributed who began as mathematicians, but who, in the course of their work, have been led to become more and more philosophers. Of late, however, various philosophers, who were originally in no sense mathematicians, becoming aware of the importance of the new type of research, are in their turn attempting both to a.s.similate and to supplement the undertakings which were begun from the mathematical side. As a result, the logical problem of the categories has to-day become almost equally a problem for the logicians of mathematics and for those students of philosophy who take any serious interest in exactness of method in their own branch of work. The result of this actual cooperation of men from both sides is that, as I think, we are to-day, for the first time, in sight of what is still, as I freely admit, a somewhat distant goal, namely, the relatively complete rational a.n.a.lysis and tabulation of the fundamental categories of human thought. That the student of ethics is as much interested in such an investigation as is the metaphysician, that the philosopher of religion needs a well-completed table of categories quite as much as does the pure logician, every competent student of such topics ought to admit.

And that the enterprise in question keenly interests the mathematicians is shown by the prominent part which some of them have taken in the researches in question. Here, then, is the type of recent scientific work whose results most obviously bear upon the tasks of all of us alike.

A catalogue of the names of the workers in this wide field of modern logic would be out of place here. Yet one must, indeed, indicate what lines of research are especially in question. From the purely mathematical side, the investigations of the type to which I now refer may be viewed (somewhat arbitrarily) as beginning with that famous examination into one of the postulates of Euclid's geometry which gave rise to the so-called non-Euclidean geometry. The question here originally at issue was one of a comparatively limited scope, namely, the question whether Euclid's parallel-line postulate was a logical consequence of the other geometrical principles. But the investigation rapidly develops into a general study of the foundations of geometry--a study to which contributions are still almost constantly appearing.

Somewhat independently of this line of inquiry there grew up, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, that reexamination of the bases of arithmetic and a.n.a.lysis which is a.s.sociated with the names of Dedekind, Weierstra.s.s, and George Cantor. At the present time, the labors of a number of other inquirers (amongst whom we may mention the school of Peano and Pieri in Italy, and men such as Poincare and Couturat in France, Hilbert in Germany, Bertrand Russell and Whitehead in England, and an energetic group of our American mathematicians--men such as Professor Moore, Professor Halsted, Dr. Huntington, Dr. Veblen, and a considerable number of others) have been added to the earlier researches. The result is that we have recently come for the first time to be able to see, with some completeness, what the a.s.sumed first principles of pure mathematics actually are. As was to be expected, these principles are capable of more than one formulation, according as they are approached from one side or from another. As was also to be expected, the entire edifice of pure mathematics, so far as it has yet been erected, actually rests upon a very few fundamental concepts and postulates, however you may formulate them. What was not observed, however, by the earlier, and especially by the philosophical, students of the categories, is the form which these postulates tend to a.s.sume when they are rigidly a.n.a.lyzed.

This form depends upon the precise definition and cla.s.sification of certain types of relations. The whole of geometry, for instance, including metrical geometry, can be developed from a set of postulates which demand the existence of points that stand in certain ordinal relations.h.i.+ps. The ordinal relations.h.i.+ps can be reduced, according as the series of points considered is open or closed, either to the well-known relations.h.i.+p in which three points stand when one is between the other two upon a right line, or else to the ordinal relations.h.i.+p in which four points stand when they are separated by pairs; and these two ordinal relations.h.i.+ps, by means of various logical devices, can be regarded as variations of a single fundamental form. Cayley and Klein founded the logical theory of geometry here in question. Russell, and in another way Dr. Veblen, have given it its most recent expressions. In the same way, the theory of whole numbers can be reduced to sets of principles which demand the existence of certain ideal objects in certain simple ordinal relations. Dedekind and Peano have worked out such ordinal theories of the number concept. In another development of the theory of the cardinal whole numbers, which Russell and Whitehead have worked out, ordinal concepts are introduced only secondarily, and the theory depends upon the fundamental relation of the equivalence or nonequivalence of collections of objects. But here also a certain simple type of relation determines the definitions and the development of the whole theory.

Two results follow from such a fas.h.i.+on of logically a.n.a.lyzing the first principles of mathematical science. In the first place, as just pointed out, we learn _how few and simple are the conceptions and postulates_ upon which the actual edifice of exact science rests. Pure mathematics, we have said, is free to a.s.sume what it chooses. Yet the a.s.sumptions whose presence as the foundation principles of the actually existent pure mathematics an exhaustive examination thus reveals, show by their fewness that the ideal freedom of the mathematician to a.s.sume and to construct what he pleases, is indeed, in practice, a very decidedly limited freedom. The limitation is, as we have already seen, a limitation which has to do with the essential significance of the fundamental concepts in question. And so the result of this a.n.a.lysis of the bases of the actually developed and significant branches of mathematics, const.i.tutes a sort of empirical revelation of what categories the exact sciences have practically found to be of such significance as to be worthy of exhaustive treatment. Thus the instinctive sense for significant truth, which has all along been guiding the development of mathematics, comes at least to a clear and philosophical consciousness. And meanwhile the essential categories of thought are seen in a new light.