Page:An introduction to philosophy (IA Introductiontoph00brig 0).pdf/26

in that each, animated by an impartial love of truth, seeks to understand experience intellectually. But their differences are important. The sciences specialize; they deal with restricted fields of human experience, such as matter and motion, chemical changes, or the phenomena of life. Philosophy is inclusive; it aims to interpret what is common to all fields, and to understand the relations of the special sciences to each other. Science is analytic; its laws are statements about the relations of the parts which analysis has revealed. Philosophy is synoptic; it does not omit the necessary work of analysis and synthesis, but it lays stress on the properties which experience taken as a whole reveals.^[1] Hence science has often been said to deal with phenomena (things as they appear in our experience), philosophy with noumena (things as they really are for valid thought).
Science starts with the assumption made by “common sense,” that there is a world of real space, real time, and real matter; that we have minds which are conscious of this world through our senses and reflection on sense data, and that all these things truly are as they appear to be. So evident does this seem to “the man on the street” (who figures largely in philosophical discussion) that when he hears of philosophy’s raising questions about these matters, he is confused and inclined to be impatient. Science begins where common sense begins, and does not, like philosophy, make a business of criticizing the assumptions of every-day life with reference to their meaning for experience as a whole.

1. ↑ The fact that wholes have properties that their parts do not have is one of the most important facts about our world, and philosophy’s deepest interest is in this fact. Professor Spaulding, a protagonist of analysis, admits the fact, but characterizes it as non-rational (Holt and others, The New Realism, page 241). See §11, (2) below.