Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/151

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THE MISSION OF PHILOSOPHY.
[Vol. XIV.

analysis of the act of knowledge out of their narrow application to the individual, and apply them to the experience of the race, we have our pathway to a certain measure of success in the mission of philosophy lighted up at its entrance, if not indeed throughout its entire course. For these considerations lead us to a point of view from which to gain an enlarged and a much more profound comprehension of the nature of man's spirit, or complex of rational faculties, in its relation to Reality, under the conditions implied in its own historical development. As in the individual, so in the race, all these so-called faculties cooperate in the evolution of the total life of man. All of them have ontological value. All of them have rights which cannot be denied or overlooked without prejudice to the totality of human cognitive experience. What is called science in the narrower meaning of the word turns out to be, when it is expanded and illumined by that critical and reflective thinking in which the method of philosophy consists, a theory of reality. And therefore philosophy can never abrogate, or too highly estimate, its rights and its power to seek and to find a scientific and speculative system of truths which shall furnish a more profound interpretation of the principles and the significance of the Universe as known by man. Philosophy can never consent to become merely, or chiefly, a matter of feeling or a matter of will. It is essentially, and always must remain, a matter of scientific and systematic thought over the problems of nature and of human life, with a view to their progressively improved but always imperfect solution.

But, again, to refuse to relinquish the attempt at a scientifically established and rationally defensible theory of reality, is by no means to disparage or neglect the influence and the indispensable service of the æsthetical, ethical, and religious, as well as of all the more vaguely social sentiments of human nature. For all these sentiments are not only, in fact, influential and actually never to be disregarded with impunity; but they, too, are also functions of reason, in the broader and higher meaning of this term. They too have ontological significance and value. At the risk of seeming to overstate the case, or at best to state it but vaguely, I will say that the feelings, conceptions, and ideals of art, mo-