THE PHILOSOPHICAL BATTLEFIELD
263
approaches wherever differences in value-judgments were not re–
solvable by scientific inquiry into factual consequences.
Two things became clear in the discussion of the nature of reason.
First, that reason was not merely the use of formal logic, for a person
could still be logical in judging what follows from certain premises
without being reasonable in his judgment of values or judgment of
anything else. Second,
it
was just as clear that reason could not be
identified with any special method employed in any special field, for
one could be reasonable in his judgments about human behavior even
though such behavior could not be placed in a mathematical scale
or put in a test tube.
What, then, was reason? The nearest anyone came to giving a
positive answer was Professor Bernays of Zurich, notable for his work
in
the philosophy of mathematics and logic. He warned that to insist
on standards of evidence and rigor, exemplified in the exact sciences,
as criteria for all other fields of knowledge was to play into the hands
of the prophets of irrationalism and despair by restricting the possible
domains of rational inquiry. Scientism could be just as much an
obstacle to the advance of new knowledge as obscurantist metaphysics.
Both positivism, which limited itself to what was observed by the
senses, and apriorism, which laid down as forever binding certainties
in advance of experience, must be rejected. Reason, for Professor
Bernays, was the common or general procedure illustrated in the
different sciences from the most exact to the most inexact. The com–
mon pattern of this generalized scientific method, according to Pro–
fessor Bernays, did not shrink in horror from metaphysical problems
or questions of
Lebensphilosophie.
Reason was truly sovereign in all
domains. There was something tantalizingly similar between the stand–
points of Professor Bernays and those of John Dewey, but when Pro–
fessor Bernays was asked to develop his positive conception of reason
in
greater detail, he pleaded for more time and promised to work
out the details on another occasion.
As
if to drive home the realization how precarious the place of
reason is, Bertrand Russell read a paper during the same session on
"The Postulates of Scientific Method." In order to avoid the appear–
ance of logical inconsistency, he argued, scientists must
assume
certain
beliefs to be true about the nature of the world. These assumptions
themselves cannot be proved scientifically without begging the ques-
