Page:An introduction to philosophy (IA Introductiontoph00brig 0).pdf/27
It is however noteworthy that the world which science comes to describe is very different from the world present to our senses. Physics, for example, talks about matter,—but this matter is not said to be colored, or sounding, or sweet
or sour; only the so-called primary qualities (of mass and motion) belong to the matter itself, whereas the secondary qualities (of color, brightness, sound, taste, etc.) exist only in our consciousness as the result of the action of the primary qualities.[1] Thus science moves fast and far from the opinions of crude common sense; yet not so fast nor so far as philosophy! For science modifies common sense only in so far as the demands of investigation in some special field compel such modification; while philosophy challenges at the outset the assumptions of the sciences in order to find out whether they are true in the light of experience as a whole. That is to say, philosophy is critical[2] in a sense in which science is not; it is (to borrow Bradley’s illuminating usage) skeptical in that it aims “to become aware of and to doubt all preconceptions’’;[3] not that the mood of doubt is the final mood of philosophy, but that he who has never doubted has never crossed the threshold of philosophy’s dwelling-place.
Science, furthermore, is chiefly (and many believe, wholly) a description of the laws of phenomena. These laws are, for the most part, causal and mathematical. They are in form: if A, then B; if sodium and chlorine combine under
proper conditions, then common salt is formed. Pure science ignores every consideration of value. It is true that common salt, for instance, is of value to man, and that