ANTI-NATURALISM IN EXTREMIS
27
anti-naturalism operates to delay and frustrate the use of methods
by which alone understanding of, and consequent ability to guide,
social relationships can be attained.
In this connection, it is appropriate to say something which
is more or less apart from the main topic of this paper. Philo–
sophic naturalism still has a work to do in a field that so far it
has hardly done more than touch. Because of the influence of
supernatural religion, first Catholic and then Protestant, it is not
just "matter" which continues to reflect the beliefs of a pre-scien–
tific and pre-democratic period. Such words as mind, subject,
self, person,
the
individual, to say nothing of "value," are more
than tinged in their current usage--which affects willy-nilly philo–
sophical formulations-with significations they absorbed from be–
liefs of an extra-natural character. There is almost no word em–
ployed in psychological and societal analysis and description that
does not reflect this influence.
Hence comes the conclusion that the most pressing problem
and the most urgent task of naturalism at the present time is to
work out, on the basis of available evidence, a naturalistic inter–
pretation of the things and events designated by the words that
now exert almost complete control of psychological and societal
inquiry and report. For example, no issue is more basic for natur–
alistic theory than the nature of observation. A survey of con–
temporary literature will, nevertheless, disclose that it is rarely
discussed in its own terms :-that is of procedures employed by
inquirers in astronomical observatories; in chemical, physical and
biological laboratories; in' the examinations conducted by physi–
cians, and in what is done in field excursions of botanists and
zoologists. Instead, it appears to be obligatory to substitute for
observation of observation its reduction to terms of sensations,
sensa, sense-data (the exact word is of little import), which are
affected by an inheritance of non-naturalism.
The current discussion of language-also a topic of basic
importance-affords another example. Students of this subject,
from a logical and a social point of view, who regard themselves
as anti-metaphysical scientific positivists, write as if words con–
sisted of an "inner," private, mentalistic core or substance and
an "outer" physical shell by means of which a subjective intrin–
sically incommunicable somewhat gets conveyed "trans-subjec·
