Introduction to philosophy Author:George Trumbull Ladd Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO THE PARTICULAR SCIENCES. NOTHING is in these days more important for the true conception and successful pursuit of p... more »hilosophy than to determine precisely its relation to the particular sciences. The entire history of speculative thinking enforces this truth. History reveals the suffering of philosophy from its failures, in the ancient and mediaeval eras, to distinguish itself from the more positive forms of human knowledge. It reveals also the great influence which modern scientific methods have already exercised, and it prophesies the yet greater influence which they are destined to exercise in the future, for the correction and improvement of philosophy. Even a measure of the strong contempt prevalent among devotees of physical science for so- called metaphysics has been a real service to the same cause. It is no longer possible to cultivate philosophy in virtual disregard of the conclusions reached by observers in the different classes of physical and psychological phenomena. The new physics and the new psychology both demand a hearing at the court which claims to have supreme and final appellate jurisdiction. But who is sufficient to sit as judge in that court? Certainly not the man who has been educated amidst invincible ignorance of both the new physics and the new psychology. Yet further: the expert students of the particular sciences cannot avoid the enterprise of passing judgment upon the problems which belong, in a peculiar way, to speculative thought. The man of the Scholastic or the strictly Hegelian development, in his day, felt himself competent to deduce the principles ofthe positive sciences from the laws of absolute existence. And was it not his peculiar business to be familiar with those laws ? But the tables are...« less