The Larger Aspects of Socialism
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II THE APPEAL TO SCIENCE The new philosophy opposes all intellectual authority. Above all, it denies the authority of "Science," viewed as an accumulation of "facts" or "laws." At the same time it is the philosophy of science, for its aim is to , /make the scientific method and attitude the basis of all i human thought and activity. .- In the daily thinking of most educated people science is held to have provided us with certain universal "laws," though the true scientist has long ago admitted that science works exclusively with hypotheses. But it is inevitable that the general public should take the broadest hypotheses of the day, such as those of evolution, and make them the foundation of its thinking. The only cure for this is that the generalizations of science should be so broad and so hypothetical in
...their very form of statement as no longer to be capable of use for the purpose of setting up these new dogmas, which have been so well termed the "superstitions of science." Unfortunately for this purpose the philosophers of science until the advent of pragmatism almost ignored the broadest of all hypotheses, the basis of science itself. They forgot that science owed its origin to the evolution , of human society, and that its future lay exclusively in the service of that society. This social or pragmatic hypothesis regards science as a means, the previous philosophies of science regarded it as an end; pragmatism wishes science to serve life, evolutionism wanted science | to rule over life. In answer to the question, "What knowledge is the most worth?", Herbert Spencer did not hesitate for a moment to answer, "Science." If the term were used in a sufficiently broad sense, including psychological and social science, this is precisely the pragmat...
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