It has given us ‘philosophers’ whose knowledge
about the facts with which serious thinking has to
deal has been hopelessly inaccurate; it has also given
us ‘men of science’ who have been ‘ageometretes’
and have, by consequence, when forced to offer some
account of first principles, taken refuge in the wildest
and weirdest improvisation. For really fruitful
work we need the union in one person of the ‘man
of science’ and the ‘philosopher’,
or at least the most intimate co-operation between
the two. Our theories of first principles require
to be constantly revised, purified, and quickened
by contact with knowledge of detailed fact; and our
representations of fact call for constant restatement
in terms of a system of more and more thoroughly thought-out
postulates or first principles. This is perhaps
why the department of human knowledge in which the
last half-century has seen the most remarkable advances
is just that in which unremitting scrutiny of principles
has gone most closely hand-in-hand with the mastery
of fresh masses of detail, pure mathematics, and again
why the present state of what is loosely called ‘evolutionary’
science is so unsatisfactory to any one who has a
high ideal of what a science ought to be. It exhibits
at once an enormous mass of detailed information and
an apparently hopeless vagueness about the meaning
of the ‘laws’ by which all this detail
is to be co-ordinated, the reasons for thinking these
laws true, and the precise range of their significance.
The work of men like Cantor, Dedekind, Frege, Whitehead,
Russell, is providing us with an almost unexceptional
theory of the first principles required for pure mathematics.
We are already in a position to say with almost complete
freedom from uncertainty what undefined simple notions
and undemonstrated postulates we have to employ in
the science and to express these ultimates without
ambiguity. ‘Evolutionary science,’
rich as is its information about the details of the
processes going on in the organic world, seems still
to await its Frege or Russell. It talks, for
example, much of ‘hereditary’ and non-hereditary
peculiarities, and some of us can remember a time
when our friends among the biologists seemed almost
ready to put each other to the sword for differences
of opinion about the inheritability of certain characteristics;
but no one seems to trouble himself much with the
question a philosopher would think most important
of all—precisely what is meant by the metaphor
of ‘inheritance’ when it is applied to
the facts of biology. (Indeed, it is still quite fashionable
to talk not merely as if a ‘character’
were, like a house or an orchard, a thing which
can be transferred bodily from the possession of a
parent to the possession of the offspring, but even
as though an ‘heir’ could ‘inherit’
himself.)