THE
SOCIOLOGY OF EXISTENTIALISM
,
293
III
Due to all these circumstances, these conceptual systems
were penetrated only slowly by scientific criticism. The 'latter pro–
ceeded partly from mathematically formalized natural science, partly
from the epistemological critique of Hume and Kant, partly from
political theory and value-free sociology, in the form which reached
its peak with Max Weber.
As
early a thinker as William of Occam shrewdly recognized the
fundamental error of the anthropomorphic-normative world-view:
the confusion of the real setting of goals and norms by acting and
choice-making creatures with their merely metaphorical use for the
description of natural processes, the result of which, when their
course is undisturbed, is determinate from the start
(Quodlibet IV,
quo 2). Yet it was nearly three hundred years before the method
of modern science actually excluded those metaphors. As mathema–
tical hypotheses became connected with empirical verification, there
was simply no further place for anthropomorphic analogies. Besides,
the new method produced a constantly increasing wealth of concrete,
mutually confirmatory and complementary results of such precision
and practical significance, that one may speak of an absolutely new
epoch in intellectual history. But though the modern concept of na–
turallaw was indeed radically distinct from the concept of the norm,
the conviction of the sublimity of the cosmic order nevertheless sur–
vived long after, as for example in Newton and Kant. Yet the same
thinker who attested his reverence for the starry heavens already saw
the implication of the insight that natural laws have nothing to say
about value or obligation. The "cosmos" idea separates off from the
empirical world and establishes itself independently as a
mundus intel–
ligibilis,
a kingdom of ends, which is ordered according to an in–
violable and non-contradictory moral law, as the empirical world is
by the laws of nature.
Meantime, after beginnings in Suarez, Malebranche and Spinoza,
the separation of knowledge and value had been completed with
David Hume. In his definitive
Treatise of Human Nature
the Scots–
man explains with cool clarity that evaluating attitudes have no
theoretical content. They are original data, which demonstrate noth–
ing beyond themselves, since they say nothing about any matter of
