MALICIOUS PHILOSOPHIES
47
what the sciences in fact accomplish. Consider, for example, the
following comments of the late Lord Balfour:
What are we to say about a universe reduced without re–
mainder to collections of electric charges radiating throughout
a hypothetical ether? ... We can certainly act on our environ·
ment, and as certainly our actions can never be adequately
explained in terms of entities which neither think, nor feel, nor
purpose, nor know. It constitutes a spiritual invasion of the
physical world :- it is a miracle. . . . We are spiritual beings,
and must take account of spiritual values. The story of man is
something more than a mere continuation of the story of matter.
It is different in kind....•
That this represents a caricature of what the achievements of
physics imply, will be evident if we recall that the sciences seek
to determine the precise
conditions
under which events come into
being and continue to exist. For in ascertaining those conditions
the sciences do not
thereby deny
the existence of any traits found
in nature, whether in the human scene or elsewhere. In particular,
physics has assumed the task of finding the most general and
pervasive constituents and circumstances of existing things; it
does not legislate away as unreal or non-existent-and could not
do so without contradiction-the things and events into whose
conditions of existence it inquires. The explanations which physics
offers for the traits and changes it studies, consist of careful speci–
fications of the conditions under which those traits and changes
occur; and no other sense of "explanation" is relevant in discussing
its findings. Whether these explanations can be stated entirely in
terms of a special class of entities and their relations (for example,
in terms of the distribution of electrically charged particles), is
a specific empirical issue which can be resolved only by detailed
empirical inquiry; it cannot be settled by dialectic, or by an
apriori
fiat such as that the living cannot be explained in terms
of non-living.
Criticisms of natural science such as the following are there–
fore altogether pointless, since they operate with mythological
conceptions as to the character of its explanations:
With the faintest and simplest element of consciousness,
natural science meets something for which it has no pigeon–
hole anywhere in its system....Mind at its best is autonomous.
Granting that it is connected mysteriously and intimately with
'Arthur
J.
Balfour, in an essay contributed to
Science, Religion and Reality
(edited
by
Joseph Needham), pp.
15-17.
