50
PARTISAN REVIEW
Ill
The views which have been noticed thus far attempt to
limit
the scope of scientific methods on the basis of considerations that
are at least nominally scientific in character. The criticisms of
science to which attention must next be directed do not even pre–
tend to adduce scientific grounds for their claims, and are frankly
based upon explicit theological and metaphysical commitments
for which no experimental evidence is invoked. The chief burden
of their complaints is that science offers no "ultimate explana·
lions" for the facts of existence; and their chief recommendation
is the cultivation of "ontological wisdom" as the sole method for
making "ultimately intelligible" both the order of the cosmos and
the nature of the good life.
Some citations from recent writers will exhibit more clearly
than would a paraphrase the unique mixture of pontifical dog–
matism, oracular wisdom, and condescending obscurantism which
seems to be the indispensible intellectual apparatus of this school
of criticism. Professor Gilson characterizes the plight of science
as follows:
This world· of ours is a world of change; physics, chem·
istty, biology, can teach us the laws according to which change
actually happens to it; wha:t these sciences cannot teach us is
why this world, taken together with its laws, its order, and its
intelligibility is, or exists. . . . Scientists never ask themselves
why
things happen, hut
how
they happen. Now as soon as you
substitute the positivist's notion of relation for the metaphysical
notion of cause, you at once lose all right to wonder
why
things
are, and why they are what they are. . . . Why anything at all
is,
Qr exists, science knows not, precisely because it cannot even
ask the question. To this supreme question the only answer is
that each and every particular existential energy, and each and
every particular existing thing,. depends for its existence upon a
pure Act of existence. In order to he the ultimate answer to all
existential problems, this supreme cause has to he absolute ex·
istence. Being absolute, such a cause is self-sufficient;
if
it
creates, its creative act must
he
free. Since it creates not only
being hut order, it must he something which at least eminently
contains the only principle of order known to us in experience,
namely, thought.'
'Etienne Gilson,
God
and
Philosophy,
pp. 72, 140. Although Whitehead's manner
of arriving at his speculative cosmology is radically different from that cultivated
by neo-Thomista, his evaluations of the limitations of natural science are frequently
not diaeimilar. He commentl as follows on "the grand doctrine of Nature as a self.
auflicient meaningless complex of facts": "Newton left for empirical investigation
the
det~ination
of the particular stresses now existing. In this determination be
