BOO KS
49 1
subject matter; it is always the testing of some hypothesis which concen–
trates in a simple formula a wide range of observations.
Any philosopher who accepts all three propositions is thereby bound
to disappoint the public looking for guidance about the principles of
esthetic criticism or the nature of law and of history. He disappoints
them because he will never presume to tell the public
why
they
must
adapt their methods of inquiry to their subject-matter in certain spe–
cific ways. There will be no
a priori
deduction of the necessary pe–
culiarities of esthetic criticism, of law or of historical method. That
men respond to art in certain specific ways, or that their legal systems
assume certain forms, or that their understanding of their own past
stresses some features of social life rather than others-these will be left
as contingent matters of fact. The necessary connections between dif–
ferent powers of mind are to be left unexplained. We must not even
presume that there are any necessary connections. This repudiation of any
systematic philosophy of mind is essential to modern empiricism, to that
philosophy which now flourishes at H arvard and in most British uni–
versities: for this philosophy orginated as reaction against the
a priori
psychology of Kant and H egel and Husserl. Its first requirement was
that psychology should be left to the psychologists, and that philosophers
should once and for all cease to pose as super-scientists of the mind, as
they have ceased to be super-scientists of matter. It would be ridiculous
to suppose or to hope that this revolution in thought will ever be re–
versed. It is a kind of Luddite heresy, the heresy of those who try to de–
stroy the new machines, to suppose that the discoveries of the last thirty
years can ever be forgotten or ignored. At the same time one ought
surely to count the loss. The loss is that the idea of philosophy as ex–
planation of the forms of thought, and not simply as neutral description
of them, disappears. Therefore the idea of philosophy as giving
guidance
to literary critics, to theorists of law, and to historians, also disappears.
Philosophers become intellectual policemen, who direct the traffic and
prevent coIIisions; they cannot tell the critics, lawyers or historians where
they should be going. This is the ground of the public's dissatisfaction,
and of the occasional turning back to the empty remains of Hegelianism
in Jaspers and Heidegger. There will always be those who wish to per–
suade themselves that the old arbitrary play with philosophical abstrac–
tions still has some direct relevance to understanding the issues of de–
segregation and of social justice. So two uncomrnunicating worlds came
into existence: the journalistic philosophy of the popular thinker, whose
cheerful eclecticism is taken for originality, and the strict and enclosed
philosophy of the academic journals. Morton White is here an admir-
