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that there is anything in the world the knowledge of which makes it
necessary for us to talk about things this way. It may be a necessary
law of the being of a centaur that it should be half man and half
beast, but it is not necessary that this be recognized in biology or
even in mythology.
There is also a fundamental ambiguity in the formulations of
this
school of thought which seems to me unresolved. Some--like
Father Henle, if I understand him-claim that although the subject
matter of the philosophy of nature is the same as that of natural
science, i.e., corporeal being, the two disciplines, as bodies of knowl–
edge, are autonomous of each other. Perhaps the autonomy is analo–
gous to the autonomy between physics and economics. We can
establish the economic laws that determine the
frrice
of iron inde–
pendently of the physical laws that determine its electro-magnetic
properties and vice versa. Other representatives of the Thomistic
philosophy of nature seem to construe the relation between the phi–
losophy of nature and natural science not as one of autonomy but
of subordination, the latter to the former. For example, Bonnet as–
serts in the same article from which I quoted earlier that the philoso–
phy of nature "can direct him (the scientist) in his experimentation
and indicate the presence of error" whereas science can be of aid
to the philosopher only in providing "further examples of the uni–
versal application of philosophical principles...." It is
not
asserted
that facts and hypotheses about nature can be "deduced" from
philosophical principles or that they can be "founded" on the latter,
so that it is difficult to understand by virtue of what knowledge the
philosopher of nature is to direct and correct the natural scientist in
his
work.
In passing it should be noted that the philosophy of dialectical
materialism, which is another variant of a philosophy of nature,
makes precisely the same claim, with no better grounds, to direct
and correct the experimental work of the natural scientist. Any such
claim no matter what its source is in fact an arrogant assertion that
the philosopher of nature is really a better scientist than the scientist
who pursues scientific truth without benefit of the allegedly necessary
truths of philosophy. It seems to me that such an assertion is not
only false but vicious, for it provides a convenient premise for po–
litical and religious restriction of scientific inquiry.
