The Future of Science (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 edition. Excerpt: ... in the abstract world of pure reason that people beget a sympathy with life, all that touches and moves us belongs always more or less to the body. As for us, we have shifted the field of the science of man. It is his life we want to know, and life means both the body and the soul, not placed facing one another like clocks that tick in time, not soldered together like two different metals, but united into one twofronted phenomenon which cannot be divided, without destroying it. Our science of man, then, is no longer an abstract thing that may be built up a priori and from general views; it is the universal experimental method applied to human life, and consequently the study of all the products within the sphere of its activity, above all of its spontaneous activity. I prefer to the most beautiful Cartesian disquisitions the theory of primitive poesy and the national epic as Wolf viewed them, "as they have been definitely settled by the comparative study of literatures. If aught can make us understand the aim of criticism and the importance of the discoveries we may expect from it, it is assuredly the fact of having explained by the same laws Homer and the Ramayana, the Niebelungen and the ShahNameh, the romance of the Cid, our own mediaeval legendary poems (Chansons de Gestes) the heroio songs of Scotland and Scandinavia (11.3). There are traits of humanity capable of being fixed once for all, and for which the most ancient pictures are the best. Homer, the Bible, and the Vedas will last for ever. They will be read when the intermediary works shall have been forgotten; they will ever be the sacred books of humanity. In fact, to the two phases of human thought there are two corresponding literatures; primitive literatures, the...