FROM METAPHYSICS TO LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY
315
though, of course, everybody acknowledged that we bled, had to eat and
did much that other animals did as well. Nevertheless, our having a mind
appears to have been such a shocking, awesome fact that it was pretty much
believed by intellectuals that human beings really are not ultimately of this
earth. Augustine exclaimed:
How great, my God, is this force of memory, how exceedingly great!
It is like a vast and boundless subterranean shrine.... Yet this is a fac–
ulty of my mind and belongs to my nature; nor can I myself grasp all
that I am. Therefore the mind is not large enough to contain itself.
But where can that uncontained part of it be?
Thus the facts and principles that are of interest to human life as
such-among them the facts and principles of ethics, morality, politics,
etc.-were for many centuries considered to be related to spiri tuali ty.
Arguably in the age of enormous scientific and technological success, this
did not bode well for such concerns.
It had been relatively easy for Augustine, for example,
qua
ontologist,
to make room for freedom of the will. He was not constrained by any loy–
alty to materialism, even though he was beginning to reject the influential
dualist thinking of Manicheism. Even in our day, most people receive their
ethical-moral teachings from church, not from science, and relate values in
general to a supposed non-natural or spiritual realm. This is largely because
the naturalistic fram.ework is infected with a reductive materialist ontology
and thus cannot yield a coherent account of human causal agency, purpo–
siveness and ultimately, of moral responsibility.
As science gradually made its gains on this spiritualistic approach to
human life (actually to an understanding of the whole universe) not only
was the idealistic other-worldly focus beginning to recede for many of the
most formidable minds but morali ty, too, became dethroned from its ear–
lier lofty place. Ethics proper began to occupy a less prominent position in
our educated, academic culture. Human beings were beginning to be
viewed as just more complicated physical beings. Everything was ultimate–
ly thought of as governed by the principles of classical mechanics, that is,
the physics which got its major expression in the work of Isaac Newton.
In Hobbes, we have only moral psychology, not morality proper. In Locke,
morality is squeezed in with great difficulty, as is free will. As with other
luminaries of empiricism, morality is explained away in various causal
terms-e.g., in David Hume and Adam Smith.
Thus the baby was thrown out with the bath water. To appropriate
the study of nature, everything that even seemed otherworldly had been
