Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/159

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ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY

quite other than its own of docile experience and patient reflexion upon experience — methods that philosophy is now prepared to vindicate as higher and still more trustworthy. For the primacy of mind over Nature, the legislative relation of mind to the world, has been found to be the real presupposition of science itself, and the tacit recognition of this truth to be the clue to the first sudden advance of modern science, and to its unparalleled subsequent progress.^[1]

↑ The epochal sentences of Kant, in his preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, have been more than verified by the century of science and philosophy that has passed since they first saw the day: “When Galilei made his balls roll down the inclined plane with a gravitation selected by himself, or Torricelli had the air support a weight which he had previously taken equal to a known column of water, or Stahl later converted metals into lime, and this into metal again, by withdrawing something and then putting it back, a light dawned on all investigators of Nature. They comprehended that Reason only sees into what she herself produces after her own design; that with her principles of judgment according to invariable laws, she must take the lead, and compel Nature to answer her questions, not let herself be merely taught by Nature to walk, as if in leading-strings; for otherwise she would be left to observations only casual, and these, made on no plan designed beforehand, do not at all connect in a necessary law, which yet is what Reason seeks and must have. With her principles in one hand, solely by accord with which can agreements among phenomena get the value of laws, and with experiment in the other, which she has devised according to them. Reason must approach Nature, to learn from her, indeed, but not in the quality of a pupil, who submits to be prompted as the teacher pleases; on the contrary, in the quality of an invested judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to questions which he puts to them himself,” — The Critique of Pure Reason, edition of 1787, pp. xii, xiii.

[1] The epochal sentences of Kant, in his preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, have been more than verified by the century of science and philosophy that has passed since they first saw the day: “When Galilei made his balls roll down the inclined plane with a gravitation selected by himself, or Torricelli had the air support a weight which he had previously taken equal to a known column of water, or Stahl later converted metals into lime, and this into metal again, by withdrawing something and then putting it back, a light dawned on all investigators of Nature. They comprehended that Reason only sees into what she herself produces after her own design; that with her principles of judgment according to invariable laws, she must take the lead, and compel Nature to answer her questions, not let herself be merely taught by Nature to walk, as if in leading-strings; for otherwise she would be left to observations only casual, and these, made on no plan designed beforehand, do not at all connect in a necessary law, which yet is what Reason seeks and must have. With her principles in one hand, solely by accord with which can agreements among phenomena get the value of laws, and with experiment in the other, which she has devised according to them. Reason must approach Nature, to learn from her, indeed, but not in the quality of a pupil, who submits to be prompted as the teacher pleases; on the contrary, in the quality of an invested judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to questions which he puts to them himself,” — The Critique of Pure Reason, edition of 1787, pp. xii, xiii.

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