The Interpretation of Nature (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 Excerpt: ...it, and knew it for what it was--perform, I say, all this, and, though you may indeed have attained to science, in nowise will you have attained to a self-sufficing system of beliefs. One thing at least will remain, of which this long-drawn sequence of causes and effects gives no satisfying explanation; and that is knowledge itself. Natural science must ever regard knowledge as the product of irrational conditions, for in the last resort it knows no others. It must always regard knowledge as rational, or else science itself disappears." The consideration of the growth of our knowledge, however, brings us into touch with mental science. Let us see what naturalism has to say concerning an interpretation of mental phenomena. VIII. THE hypothesis of mental development in the individual and mental evolution in the race is now generally accepted, widely accepted, too, is the close and intimate connection of brain and mind. We have to consider, then, some of the implications of a strictly naturalistic interpretation of consciousness as a function of nerve tissue. I shall deal with the matter as far as possible from the strictly scientific standpoint, leaving metaphysical inferences entirely on one side for the present. A number of facts which are sufficiently familiar, and which are generally admitted, warrant us in believing that, in many cases, mental states are, in some way that we cannot adequately explain, the concomitants of certain organic changes in the brain. It cannot be proved that this is so in all cases. But the method of science is, as we have seen, to carry its generalisations to their ideal limits--limits which go beyond the boundaries of actual observation. In a word, science believes, and is methodologically justified in believing, more than...