tendencies of the period. Toward the end of the nineteenth century more and more facts became known in physics and biology that could not be explained or controlled by means of the laws of mechanics, with the result that the catchword
“ignorabimus”
was soon converted into the even more exciting slogan, “the bankruptcy of science.”
This feeling of the failure of rational scientific thought was intensified by various social developments. Science — that is, science guided by the spirit of mechanistic physics — had led men during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to believe in the possibility of continual progress. If men only acted according to the teachings of science instead of irrational superstitions, mankind would be freed from all need. The political expression of this faith was liberalism. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, it became ever clearer that the attempts based on science and the faith in progress had not succeeded in abolishing the economic misery of the great mass of the population, or in eliminating the psychological suffering of individual human beings. A feeling of despair developed which expressed the convictionthat scientific theory and practice were a disappointment. Alongside liberalism, new political currents developed that had their own conceptions of science, conceptions differing from the mechanistic view. One tendency propagated a return to the organismic science of the Middle Ages, and from it developed the authoritarian socialism that became the germ-cell of later fascism in all its varieties. Another movement, represented by Karl Marx, wanted to transform “mechanistic” materialism into “dialetical” materialism, and from it developed the communism of the twentieth century.
It was impossible to deny that science was still the basis of technological progress, but it was believed that it could be disparaged by speaking of it as the church did about the Copernican system of the world: that mechanistic natural science provided only a useful guide for action, and no true knowledge of nature. Around 1900 Abel Rey, a French philosopher and historian of science, gave a very acute and trenchant description of the dangers for general intellectual life entailed by such an attitude of despair. He said:
“If these sciences which have had an essentially emancipating effect in history go down in a crisis which leaves them only with the significance of technically useful information but robs them of every value in connection with the cognition of nature, this must bring about a complete revolution. The emancipation of the mind as we owe it to physics is a most fatally erroneous idea. One must introduce another way, and give credit to subjective intuition, to a mystical sense of reality.”
There have been two ways out of this crisis of science which had developed in consequence of the breakdown of mechanistic physics. In his book
The Idealistic Reaction against Science
, Aliotta, an Italian, described the situation in the following very striking manner:
“Could thought rest easy in this complacent agnosticism? There were two ways of escaping this intolerable situation: either to turn to the other function of the mind (besides intellect) or to eliminate the problem altogether by proving that it is due to a faulty perspective and false conception of science. Both ways have been tried. On the one hand, by a return to the moralism of Fichte and the æstheticism of the romanticists, into which the rebellious genius of Nietzsche has breathed new life, the will as the creative source of all values and of unfettered æsthetic intuition is exalted above intelligence. On the other hand, the bases of the mechanical conception and its chief instruments — geometrical intuition and mathematical calculation —are subjected to a searching examination. This analysis, to which men of science themselves were impelled by the discovery of the new principle of energy and by
“ignorabimus”
was soon converted into the even more exciting slogan, “the bankruptcy of science.”
This feeling of the failure of rational scientific thought was intensified by various social developments. Science — that is, science guided by the spirit of mechanistic physics — had led men during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to believe in the possibility of continual progress. If men only acted according to the teachings of science instead of irrational superstitions, mankind would be freed from all need. The political expression of this faith was liberalism. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, it became ever clearer that the attempts based on science and the faith in progress had not succeeded in abolishing the economic misery of the great mass of the population, or in eliminating the psychological suffering of individual human beings. A feeling of despair developed which expressed the convictionthat scientific theory and practice were a disappointment. Alongside liberalism, new political currents developed that had their own conceptions of science, conceptions differing from the mechanistic view. One tendency propagated a return to the organismic science of the Middle Ages, and from it developed the authoritarian socialism that became the germ-cell of later fascism in all its varieties. Another movement, represented by Karl Marx, wanted to transform “mechanistic” materialism into “dialetical” materialism, and from it developed the communism of the twentieth century.
It was impossible to deny that science was still the basis of technological progress, but it was believed that it could be disparaged by speaking of it as the church did about the Copernican system of the world: that mechanistic natural science provided only a useful guide for action, and no true knowledge of nature. Around 1900 Abel Rey, a French philosopher and historian of science, gave a very acute and trenchant description of the dangers for general intellectual life entailed by such an attitude of despair. He said:
“If these sciences which have had an essentially emancipating effect in history go down in a crisis which leaves them only with the significance of technically useful information but robs them of every value in connection with the cognition of nature, this must bring about a complete revolution. The emancipation of the mind as we owe it to physics is a most fatally erroneous idea. One must introduce another way, and give credit to subjective intuition, to a mystical sense of reality.”
There have been two ways out of this crisis of science which had developed in consequence of the breakdown of mechanistic physics. In his book
The Idealistic Reaction against Science
, Aliotta, an Italian, described the situation in the following very striking manner:
“Could thought rest easy in this complacent agnosticism? There were two ways of escaping this intolerable situation: either to turn to the other function of the mind (besides intellect) or to eliminate the problem altogether by proving that it is due to a faulty perspective and false conception of science. Both ways have been tried. On the one hand, by a return to the moralism of Fichte and the æstheticism of the romanticists, into which the rebellious genius of Nietzsche has breathed new life, the will as the creative source of all values and of unfettered æsthetic intuition is exalted above intelligence. On the other hand, the bases of the mechanical conception and its chief instruments — geometrical intuition and mathematical calculation —are subjected to a searching examination. This analysis, to which men of science themselves were impelled by the discovery of the new principle of energy and by
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