The Anarchy of Ideas

The case against the moderns is clear enough. Less than three centuries has been sufficient to allow the inductive method an uninterrupted passage through the domain of the physical sciences. And face to face with problems no longer of inanimate nature but of conscious behaviour, the modern mind (for our present purpose essentially the product of inductive procedure) continues unchecked in the impetus of conquest. Infatuated by his discoveries, the scientist incontinently postulates faith in wholly unverified theses-enchanting his disciples with the vague and the transcendental.Psychology is substituted for metaphysic. Empirical introspection is found a more amusing pursuit than the problems of ontology. Subjective verification is the vogue. To criticise the interrogation of consciousness (to identify introspection with the arrestation of the process under examination) is to return amidst contumely to the Middle Ages. Psychology in its turn is content to take its media axiomata from physiology. There is little resentment at the annexation of mind to matter: attention is unduly urged towards the physical antecedents of what were formerly know as moral states and actions. Nor does the specialist abstain from aggressive dogmatism on matters which lie wholly outside his legitimate province. We are fairly familiar with the physician turned Father Confessor, the journalist turned theologian, the tradesman turned economist. And the hopeless diffusiveness which is mistaken for universality goes hand-in-hand with a mania for unification

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