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Chapter 3 The Development of Classification

Word Count: 1819    |    Released on: 06/12/2017

t may often be difficult to say how far the new principles of classification themselves open the way for new scientific progress and how far the great forward movements of thought in the spe

ethod of bringing order into human knowledge, for the distinction of the Platonic philosophy between dialectics, physics, and ethics pointed to the threefold character of the mind, to reason, perception, and desire; and it was on the threshold of the modern time, again, when Bacon divided the intellectual globe into three large parts according to three fundamental psychical faculties: memory, imagination, and reason. The memory gives us history; the imagination, poetry; the reason, philosophy, or the sciences. History was further divided into natural and civil history; natural history into normal, abnormal, and artificial phenomena; civil history into political, literary, and ecclesiastical h

thought. It was a philosophy of positivism, the background for the gigantic work of natural science and technique in the last two thirds of the nineteenth century. Comte's fundamental thought is that the science of Morals, in which we study human nature for the government of human life, is dependent on sociology. Sociology, however, depends on biology; this on chemistry; this on physics; this on astronomy; and this finally on mathematics. In this way, all mental and moral sciences, history and philology, jurisprudence and theology, economics and politics, are considered as sociological phenomena, as deal

from that of material phenomena, and, while it is true that every ethical action and every logical thought can, from the standpoint of the biologist, be considered as a property of matter, it is not less true that the sciences of mental phenomena, considered impartially, form a sphere of knowledge closed in itself, and must thus be co?rdinated, not subordinated, to the knowledge of the physical world. We should say thus: all knowledge falls into two classes, the physical sciences and the mental sciences. In the circle of physical sciences we have the general sciences, like physics and chemistry, the particula

the deeper thought all over the world: popular movements and scholarly efforts alike show the signs of a coming idealism, which has something better and deeper to say than merely that our life is a series of causal phenomena. Our time longs for a new interpretation of reality; from the depths of every science wherein for decades philosophizing was despised, the best scholars turn again to a discussion of fundamental conceptions and general principles. Historical thinking begins again to take the leadership which for half a century belonged to naturalistic thinking; specialistic research demands increasingly from

life, with its purposes and its ideals, its historical relations and its logical aims. The claim of materialism, that all psychical facts are merely functions of the organism, was no argument against psychology, because, though the biological view was possible, yet the other aspect is certainly a necessary supplement. In the same way it is no argument against the newer view that all purposes and ideals, all historical actions and logical thoughts, can be considered as psychological phenomena. Of course we can consider them as suc

f morality, is dealing with, refers to the other aspect in which inner life is not a phenomenon but a system of purposes, not to be explained but to be interpreted, to be approached not by causal but by teleological methods. In this case the historical sciences are no longer sub-sections of psychological or of sociological sciences; the conception of science is no longer identical with the conception of the science of phenomena. There exist sciences which do not deal with the descripti

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