PARIS, 1908
PREFACE
[6-7] Science, the fruit of knowledge and reason, serves only to ensure our actual power over nature. It only tells us how to use things but says nothing about their essence...
Thus, my main task in this work was to contrast two points of view: the positive, "scientific," and "pragmatic." I tried to be as impartial as possible in this...
CHAPTER I
THE CURRENT CENTER OF PHILOSOPHICAL DISCUSSIONS
§ 5. THE FUNDAMENTAL CONFLICT IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT
[28-29] What, then, are the possible alternatives given the current formulation of the general philosophical problem? There can be only one alternative, for the whole issue is to
preserve science and practical activity in the closest possible unity, without sacrificing one for the other, without setting them against each other. Therefore, either practical activity will be derived from science, or, conversely, science from practical activity... In the first case, we will have rationalist, intellectualist, and
positivist systems - the dogmatism of science. In the second case, we will have systems of pragmatism, fideism, or active intuition (like Bergson's) - the dogmatism of action. According to the first systems, one must know in order to act: knowledge produces
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action. According to the second, knowledge is guided by the needs of action: action produces knowledge.
But let the reader not think that these latter systems wish to revive contempt for science and a philosophy of ignorance. No, it is only after serious investigation, based on scientific, often excellent erudition, profound critical reflections on science, and even energetic "mental immersion in science," as some of these philosophers like to express it, that they come to derive science from practice. If, in doing so, they diminish science, it is unintentional; many of them, on the contrary, believe that in this way they reveal all its value...
§ 6. THE INTEREST OF CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHICAL DEBATES
[33-35] Let us, however, for a moment assume that the thesis of pragmatism is correct and that science is merely a special art, a technical means for satisfying certain needs. What would then result?
First of all, truth would be reduced to an empty word. A true proposition would become a recipe for a successful artificial procedure. And since there are several procedures capable of ensuring success under the same circumstances, and since the needs of different individuals vary greatly, we would have to accept the pragmatists' thesis: all propositions and arguments leading to the same practical results are equally valid and equally true, all thoughts yielding practical results are equally legitimate. From this new meaning of the word "truth" follows that our sciences are purely arbitrary constructions, that they could have been entirely different and yet just as true, i.e., just as suitable as tools for action.
The bankruptcy of science as a real form of knowledge, as a source of truth - this is the first conclusion. The legitimacy of other methods, very different from those of intellect and reason, such as mystical feeling, is the second conclusion. For the sake of these conclusions, this entire philosophy, which ostensibly culminates in them, was essentially constructed...
How easy it is, in such a case, to turn the free-thinkers' own weapon against them. Scientific truths! But these are truths only in name. They are also beliefs, and moreover, beliefs of a lower order, which can be used only for material
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NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY" action; they have only the value of a technical tool. Faith for faith's sake, religious dogma, metaphysical or moral ideology, is far superior to them.
In any case, they have no reason to feel inferior before science, for its privileged position has collapsed.
Indeed, most pragmatists hasten to restore, in opposition to scientific experience, moral experience, metaphysical experience, and especially religious experience...
[37] For the metaphysicians, this is a real find. Along with the restoration of religion, pragmatism contributes to the restoration of metaphysics. After Kant and Comte, positivism gradually took over almost the entire field of knowledge during the 19th century...
[39-40] Thus, the pragmatist position, as well as other positions, which, though not as philosophical, original, and interesting, nevertheless lead to similar conclusions, always have as their consequence the rehabilitation of outdated normative forms of human thought, triumphantly displaced by scientific positivism since the mid-18th century - the rehabilitation of religion, metaphysics, and moral dogmatism, i.e., in essence, social authoritarianism. This is why it is one of the two poles between which all contemporary thought, all contemporary philosophy, oscillates. This is the pole of dogmatic reaction, the spirit of authoritarianism in all its forms.
On the other hand, the opposite pole of the latest philosophical thought, the purely scientific position,
which derives practice from knowledge and therefore subordinates everything to science, is characterized primarily by the aspiration for emancipation and liberation. Here we find the innovators. They are
the heirs of the Renaissance spirit; their fathers and direct educators are especially the philosophers and scientists of the 18th century, the great century of liberation, about which Mach rightly says:
"Whoever has had the opportunity, even through literature, to partake in this rise and liberation, will forever retain a melancholic regret for the 18th century."
§ 8. METHOD. - SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
[48-49] The discussion will concern its [science's] objective significance. Some will think that it is powerless to exhaust all the reality that constitutes its object, although they may admit, from a certain point of view, its necessity...
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CHAPTER II
THE PROBLEM OF NUMBER AND CONTINUITY.
QUANTITATIVE PROPERTIES OF MATTER
§ 2. THE OLD DEBATE BETWEEN EMPIRICISM AND APRIORISM
[55] But is the exclusion of any empirical element not also an unattainable limiting case? Rationalists observe that a mathematician could continue to multiply the riches of his science even if the material world were to suddenly disappear. Yes, undoubtedly, if it were to disappear now;
but could he have created mathematics if the material world had never existed?..
§ 3. THE CONTEMPORARY FORM OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM
OF NUMBER AND CONTINUITY. THE "NOMINALIST" AND "PRAGMATIST" POSITIONS
[61-62] Bergson, who perhaps more than anyone else has contributed to the spread of these ideas in philosophical literature, would not have accepted without reservation the expression
"artificial device." In his view, science is something greater and higher than merely a device in relation to matter. But for him, matter is not true reality; it is a diminished, regressive, and dead reality. In relation to true reality, which is living, spiritual, and creative, mathematics and science in general can only have an artificial and symbolic character. In any case, it remains true that the impact on matter, rather than the knowledge of its essence, was the goal for which mathematics was created by the intellect, this first tool forged under the pressure of practical needs in the face of matter...
Is not mathematics, more than any other science, what inclines some minds today towards pragmatism, towards that sophistry of pragmatism which is scientific agnosticism? Indeed, it is in mathematics that we feel most distant from the concrete and real, closest to an arbitrary play of formulas and symbols, so abstract that it seems empty...
§ 4. RATIONALISM, LOGICISM, INTELLECTUALISM
[65] The static and homogeneous space of the geometer is insufficient; the dynamic and heterogeneous space of the physicist is also needed. The universal mechanism of nature

NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY" does not mean that there is nothing in matter but geometry. According to modern hypotheses, it may also mean that there is still the liberation or transformation of energy or the movement of electrical masses...
§ 5. THE GENERAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEM OF QUANTITY:
AT ITS CORE, IT IS A PROBLEM OF THE MIND
[74] First of all, there is no doubt that the mind, however disinterested it may be, has a utilitarian function. Scientists are not mandarins or dilettantes. And pragmatism is right when it emphasizes the utility of the mind, its exceptionally high utility. But does it not err in asserting that the mind has no other function than a utilitarian one? Could not rationalists very reasonably object that the utility of the mind is explained precisely by the fact that, in deriving propositions from propositions, it also derives relationships between natural facts from one another? It allows us to thereby influence these facts; not that this is its purpose, but it follows as a consequence. Logic and the science of quantity, created by the mind as it simply analyzes the relationships it perceives, extend their power over things themselves, because quantitative relationships are simultaneously laws of things and of the mind. If to know is to be able to, it is not because, as pragmatists think, science was created by our practical needs and for them, so that the entire value of the mind lies only in its utility, but because our mind, in learning to know things, gives us the tools to influence them...
§ 6. THE IDEAS OF MATHEMATICIAN POINCARÉ
[75-79] The great mathematician Poincaré* especially emphasizes this arbitrary character of mathematics.
Of course, our mathematics fully corresponds to reality - in the sense that it is adapted to the symbolic expression of certain relationships in the real;
it was not, strictly speaking, suggested to us by experience, but experience only provided the mind with the occasion for its creation. But our mathematics, as it gradually formed for the convenient expression of what we needed to express, is only one of infinitely many possible mathematics or, more accurately, a particular case of a much broader
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* Poincaré: La Science et l'Hypothese, livre I (Paris, Flammarion).

of a more general mathematics, to which the scientists of the 19th century aspired. Having clearly understood this, we immediately realized that mathematics, by its very essence and nature, is absolutely independent of the application it receives in experience, and, consequently, is absolutely independent of experience. It is a free creation of the mind, the most vivid manifestation of its own creative power.
Axioms, postulates, definitions, conventions - all these are essentially synonyms. Therefore, any conceivable mathematics can lead to conclusions, which, when properly expressed through an appropriate system of conventions, would be just as applicable to the real...
This theory correctly criticizes absolute rationalism and even the mitigated rationalism of Kant. It shows us that the mind was not at all inevitably compelled to develop precisely that mathematics which so well adapts to the transmission of our experience; in other words, mathematics is not the expression of some universal law of reality, whether we understand reality (of course, the one given to us) in a Cartesian, Kantian, or any other way. But for Poincaré, this conclusion has a completely different meaning than in pragmatism.
Some pragmatists and even all the commentators on Poincaré I have read, in my view, have completely misunderstood his theory. This is an excellent example of interpretative distortion. They have made Poincaré - in this point, as in others where their error is even deeper - into an unnamed pragmatist... For the pragmatist, there is no such thing as purely contemplative and disinterested thought, no such thing as pure reason. There is only thought that seeks to master things and, for this purpose, distorts its conception of them in the interest of the greatest convenience. Science and reason are servants of practice. For Poincaré, on the contrary, thought is taken to a certain extent in the Aristotelian sense of the word. Thought thinks, reason reflects for its own satisfaction; and then, beyond that, it turns out that some results of its inexhaustible creativity may be useful to us and for other purposes besides purely spiritual satisfaction.
One may not fully accept Poincaré's theory; but one should not distort it in order to then appeal to his authority. Insufficient attention has been paid to its connection with Kantianism,
Poincaré
Poincaré and Kant

REMARKS ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY" from which it entirely borrows the theory of synthetic a priori judgments, with the proviso (here Poincaré finds Kant's rationalism still too rigid) that these synthetic a priori judgments, on which all our mathematics (Euclidean) rests, should not be considered the only possible and necessary postulates of rational mathematics...
§ 7. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES
AND OTHER SCIENCES OF NATURE
[80] Does Poincaré's theory give to experience the value that it apparently possesses? A strange thing! I would like to tell the pragmatists, who constantly invoked it for their own ends and used the name of its author as an artillery piece, that I find very little pragmatic in it...
§ 8. INDICATIONS OF THE GENERAL EVOLUTION
OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND KNOWLEDGE
[87] And if science develops further due to its material utility, it should not be forgotten that it was only because of its usefulness for the mind and for the disinterested satisfaction of reason, striving to know things, that it freed itself from crude empiricism at its inception, thus becoming true science. It first gives us knowledge of reality and only then allows us to act upon it. And it must necessarily give us knowledge first, in order to then allow us to act...
§ 9. MACH'S IDEAS, RATIONALITY, AND ADAPTATION OF THOUGHT
[90-91] Does this not give us a precious indication of the essence and significance of logic and rational thought, of which mathematics has always been considered a pure emanation? And perhaps also of the essence and significance of reason? We are not far here from Mach's ideas, whom many also often declared to be an unnamed pragmatist.
To us, he seems much closer to rationalism - in the sense that we believe should now be given to this term - to a rationalism that by no means excludes the psychological history of reason with its winding paths, and above all, does not diminish the role of experience,
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Since reason is merely codified experience and, at the same time, a necessary and universal code for all experience, it is essential to simultaneously consider both the moment of evolution and the psychological organization of man...
[93-96] Thus, we see that reason, subjected to abstract analysis in the consciousness of a rational being, is capable of harmonizing through the principles discovered within it and their ideal development with the laws of the surrounding environment and is capable of expressing them.
We further see that, given the properties of our self and the environment, reason cannot be other than it is: it, therefore, indeed possesses, as the rationalists assert, necessity and universality. It is even, in a certain sense, absolute, but not in the sense that this word is understood by traditional rationalism. For the latter, it means that things exist as reason understands them. From our point of view, on the contrary, we do not know how things exist in themselves, and since Kantian or positivist relativism asserts this, it is, in its own way, correct...
Number and extension, despite their abstraction, derive from the nature of the real, because reality is multiplicity and extension, and because the relationships between things are real relationships derived from the nature of things.
Mathematics, gradually moving away from spaces accessible to sensory perception and rising to geometric space, does not, however, move away from real space, i.e., from true relationships between things. Rather, it approaches them. According to data from modern psychology, each of our senses apparently gives us extension and duration (i.e., certain connections and relationships of the real) in its own way. Perception begins to eliminate this subjective element, dependent on the individual or on accidental peculiarities of the species structure: it constructs a homogeneous and unified space and uniform duration, these syntheses in which all our diverse sensory representations of the extended and the flowing are united. Why should scientific work not continue this movement toward objectivity? In any case, its rigor, its precision, its universality (or necessity, which is the same thing) testifies to the objectivity of its results. Therefore,
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NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY" number, order, and extension can, despite our critical and subjectivist habits of thought, be considered as properties of things, i.e., real relationships, and even more real ones, as they are gradually freed by science from those individual and subjective distortions with which they were initially given to us in immediate concrete sensations. What remains after all these abstractions, should it not, then, with full justification, be considered that real and unchanging content which is imposed on beings of all kinds with equal necessity, because it does not depend on the individual, the moment of time, or the point of view?..
§ 10. WHAT MATHEMATICS TEACHES US
[97-98] Psychology, on its part, shows that all our sensations (these immediate and ultimate data of experience) have one property: extensiveness or extension...
Geometric space is the result of an abstract interpretation of optical space, an interpretation that strips away individual properties, generalizes, and makes the relationships contained in this optical space more accessible to the mind. We would readily add to Mach's thought that the purpose of this operation is to give these relationships the most rigorous and precise, universal and necessary, and, therefore, objective expression...
[100] Thus, mathematics reveals to us the relationships between things from the perspective of order, number, and extension.
By analyzing the real relationships existing between things, our mind naturally acquires the ability to form similar relationships through association by similarity. It can, therefore, invent combinations that do not occur in reality, based on those that do. Having first formed representations that are copies of the real, we can then form such as are models, as Taine says in a somewhat different sense.
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§ 11. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
[103-105] Absolute rationalism seems to have full justification in asserting, by standing on the ground of a kind of idealistic realism, that the laws of reason coincide with the laws of things. But does it not err by separating reason from things and assuming that reason, in its brilliant solitude, draws knowledge of the laws governing things from itself alone?
Yes, the analysis of reason coincides in scope with the analysis of nature. Yes, mathematics, while engaging with the former, also engages with the latter, or, if you will, provides some elements necessary for the latter. But would it not be simpler to explain this by the fact that our mental activity is formed through adaptation to the environment and practical conditions in which it must manifest itself?...
If, therefore, there is a great difference between absolute rationalism and the theory sketched above regarding the genesis of mathematical concepts, we come, on the contrary, to very similar conclusions on the question of the value and competence of mathematics: this value and this competence are absolute, in the human sense of the word. As for the superhuman meaning and some transcendental point of view, I confess that I have not yet penetrated into its mystery and am very little inclined to do so. If it is possible to achieve a human understanding of things, to give them a correct translation into the language of man, then that is enough for me...
Is this conclusion superficial and too shallow? Pragmatism, in my view, falls into another extreme, diametrically opposed to that into which traditional rationalism has fallen. The latter took the final point as the starting point and transferred the properties of the result to the beginning. Pragmatism, on the contrary, brings the final point closer to the starting point until they completely merge and attributes the properties of the beginning to the result. Would it not be more reasonable to think that mathematics, having originated on the basis of utilitarian anthropomorphism, gradually broke out of the narrow limits of this first horizon? By tirelessly perfecting its analysis, it arrived at certain real, objective, universal, and necessary relationships of things.
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NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
[107] It has its foundation in the nature of things, just as our reason and our logic, of which it is a specific application, and which were formed essentially in a similar way.
Does it matter by what path we approach reality, if, by examining it step by step, we ultimately encompass it from all sides.
CHAPTER III
THE PROBLEM OF MATTER
§ 1. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW AND THE CURRENT
STATE OF THE PROBLEM OF MATTER
[109-111] First of all, after the failures of the "physicist" philosophers, the great philosophical tradition of the Greeks, led by the Eleatics and Plato, casts doubt on the very existence of matter. Matter is only an appearance, or, at the very least, a minimal limit of existence; the science of material things can, in turn, be only a purely relative science, true science exists only about spiritual subjects. Thus, the problem of matter begins to be resolved by eliminating the problem itself. Matter can exist only as an indeterminate boundary of spirit and as functions of the spirit, and everything that pertains to matter is being of a lower order...
Thus, disputes about the reality of the external world, about idealism, spiritualism, materialism, mechanism, dynamism, increasingly seem like an outdated and fruitless game, which should be left to classical philosophy, understanding this term in the sense in which Taine understood it, as philosophy for high school classes...
[113] Vulgar materialism borrows from it [physics] both what is sound in it and what is exaggerated and monstrous. What a find for the religious spirit, if it can prove that physics knows nothing about the things on which it allows us to act, and that its explanations are not really explanations!
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§ 2. THE CRISIS OF PHYSICS AT THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY:
ENERGETIC PHYSICS
And indeed, while this philosophical hope was born and strengthened in the minds of educated and sincerely believing people, in physics everything seemed to be arranged to facilitate its justification and realization...
[114-117] Against this traditional mechanistic physics, a new physics, energetic physics, emerges. - "Emerge against" - is this the right expression?
In relation to a large number of physicists, it would perhaps be more correct to say:
"used indifferently" (as needed) alongside the mechanistic method.
Energy is, in fact, nothing but the ability to perform work, a mechanical concept that can always be accounted for mechanically, i.e., with the help of motion and the science of motion. Helmholtz, Gibbs, and many others did not break with the mechanistic tradition by adding a new chapter to mechanics, which generalized it in its applications to physical realities. They wanted nothing else and, in fact, did nothing else but correct and further develop the mechanical concept in accordance with the progress of physics, as had always been done since the time of Galileo and Descartes...
Thus, the term "energetics" has, first of all, such a meaning that it constitutes a part of physics, as this science is recognized by all scientists. Let us add that in France, this part of physics is more often called thermodynamics, and although this word, by its etymological composition, is too narrow for the content it designates, it has the advantage of eliminating all misunderstandings caused by the polysemy of the word "energetics."
The second meaning in which this word is used refers not to one particular part of physics, but to the general theory of physics taken as a whole...
This law was not incompatible with the mechanical concept. The latter could, with full justification, assert that the various manifestations of energy are, in essence, only different phenomena caused by the same fundamental reality - motion...
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NOTES ON A. RAY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
[120-123] ... Some physicists refused to see in physics merely a simple continuation of classical mechanics. They wanted to throw off the yoke of tradition, finding it, like all true revolutionaries, too narrow and too tyrannical. Hence, the petty criticism and then the revision of the fundamental principles of mechanics. From these efforts emerged a new understanding of physics—perhaps not as diametrically opposed to the old as was sometimes claimed, but certainly introducing profound changes into it.
In general, it can be said that, having found classical mechanics an insufficient basis for physics, it [physics] ceased to see in physical phenomena what had always been seen in them up to that point: various forms of motion, which constituted the subject of study of classical mechanics. Until now, to explain a physical phenomenon, to study it, meant to reduce it to forms of motion: to the movements of material masses, atoms, or to the oscillations of the universal transmitting medium—the ether. Thus, any physical explanation could be schematically expressed with the help of the geometry of motion.
The new conception, which they now wished to replace the old one, consisted, above all, in a complete rejection of all pictorial representations, of those "mechanical models," as the English say, without which there once was no real physics. Mach
harshly calls them simply "mythology." Like any mythology, it is something childish; it could be useful when we were unable to look at things directly; but whoever can walk on their own will not use crutches. Let us then discard the crutches of atomism and
ether vortices. Physics, having reached maturity, no longer needs crude images for the worship of its gods. The abstract language of mathematics alone is capable of expressing the results of experience in a fitting manner. It alone will be able to tell us what there is—without adding or concealing anything, with the strictest accuracy. Quantities defined algebraically, not geometrically, and even less mechanically; variations
in numerical values, measured using a conventional scale, rather than sensibly perceived changes, measured by displacements in space relative to some initial point—these are the materials of the new physics: this is the physics of concepts in opposition to mechanistic or pictorial physics...
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This new general theory of physics, which Rankine already had in mind in 1855, was developed especially by Mach, Ostwald, and Duhem. "The aim of every science is to replace experience with the shortest possible mental operations," says Mach; this formula could serve as an epigraph for Scientific Energetics...
§ 3. THE PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION OF ENERGETICS
[127] It is clear how philosophy, wishing to nullify the arguments drawn from science against certain specific dogmas and against the religious position in general, could use this ingenious interpretation. You put forward certain physical truths against certain beliefs? But the new physics aims only at one thing—it wants to return to the conceptions of the great era of faith. After the stormy onslaught of three centuries, it returns, like the prodigal son, to the bosom of the most orthodox Thomism.
And, what is even worse, a prominent scientist, known for the mathematical precision and elegance of his works, and especially for his active propagation of the ideas of the new physics, in the remarkably clear, purely French form in which he presents them, and with beautiful generalizations in the field of energetic mechanics—this scientist himself considered it possible to join this philosophical interpretation of the new scientific theories. We are speaking of Duhem.
Of course, he tried to strictly separate his scientific views from his metaphysical conceptions...
[130-134] Developing this point of view, the new philosophy could almost immediately derive from the contemporary attempts at reforming physics a purely descriptive, non-explanatory character for this physics. But this is precisely to the advantage of "fideism." Science is powerless to go beyond qualities; therefore, it must limit itself to their description. It must be a simple analysis of sensations, using Mach's expression, which, however, our new philosophy is afraid to borrow from him in its true sense, which has a fully "scientific" character.
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REMARKS ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
In contemporary literature, one quite often encounters - in expositions of very different quality - considerations of the following kind: the sciences of matter tell us nothing about the real, for matter, as they understand it, does not exist in the vulgar sense of the word. Even simple everyday perception distorts external reality. It constructs this reality entirely according to the needs of our activity. Science then further processes these raw materials. What it shows us under the name of matter is but a crude schema, in which all the living richness of the real has been sifted through the sieve of scientific laws, or a heterogeneous mixture of abstract elements, arbitrarily isolated or combined and entirely invented by ourselves. This clears the way for justifying the most mystical forms of idealism...
Without dwelling on these extreme delusions, one can still observe even among serious and educated minds a tendency to approach the physical sciences with a critique similar to that which Poincaré, despite his own vigorous assurances, subjected the mathematical sciences to. From this point of view, physics, like mathematics, is a symbolic language, the purpose of which is simply to make things more comprehensible, making them simpler and clearer, more accessible for communication, and, above all, more malleable in practice. To make something comprehensible, therefore, means to systematically distort the intuitive representations directly obtained from reality, in order to better utilize the latter for the satisfaction of our needs.
Comprehensibility, rationality, have nothing to do with the nature of things; they are merely tools of action.
§ 4. CRITIQUE OF THE CONTEMPORARY CRITIQUE OF PHYSICS
This interpretation of physical science, despite the fact that the vast majority of physicists have treated it with silent contempt, cannot be ignored by philosophical criticism. If scientists have the right to say: the dog barks, the wind blows, - then philosophical criticism, necessarily interested in the social and educational significance of doctrines, is compelled to pause here.
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[136-138] Most adherents of the new philosophy appeal exclusively to scientists who support energetic physics and firmly reject mechanistic physics. But the extreme supporters of energetic physics constitute, in general, a very small minority among physicists. The majority of physicists remain mechanists; they, of course, modify mechanical conceptions to bring them into line with new discoveries, for they are not scholastics. But they constantly try to depict and explain physical phenomena with movements that are accessible to sensory perception.
On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that if energetics has provided a number of elegant theories and expositions, almost all the great discoveries of recent times are due to mechanistic physicists, and all these discoveries are connected with attempts to conceive the material structure of phenomena. This circumstance deserves reflection.
In striving to give theoretical physics geometric rigor, energetics decided to simply transform it into a more concise and economical presentation of experimental data, - but can the theory of physics be reduced to a mere tool for an economical exposition? Can it completely expel the hypothesis from a science that has always been fertilized by hypotheses? Should it not constantly aim at discovering the real through theories, which, as we see in mechanistic theories, are always anticipations of experience, attempts to vividly imagine the real?
Does it not follow from this that building a philosophy of physics based exclusively on purely energetic physicists means inexplicably narrowing the base on which this philosophy should be erected? The new philosophy, in essence, seeks confirmation of its ideas only from those who may be inclined in its favor, and they form a negligible minority. This, of course, is a convenient trick, but a trick.
And are they really as inclined in its favor as it imagines?
This is more than doubtful. Almost all the scientists cited by pragmatism or so-called nominalism have guarded themselves against it with serious reservations, including Poincaré. Let us now turn to these scientists.
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NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
§ 5. WHAT CONTEMPORARY PHYSICISTS THINK
[138-144] Physics is thus a science of the real, and if it strives to express this reality in a "convenient" way, it still expresses the real itself. The "convenience" lies only in the means of expression. But what lies behind these means, which the mind can vary in search of the most convenient, is the "necessity" of the laws of nature. This necessity is not established by the free will of the mind. On the contrary, it binds the mind, confining its means of expression within narrow limits. With the precision of experimental data and with the small differences that always exist between physical phenomena subject to the same law, because they are never identical but only very similar, the law of nature is dictated to us from the outside and by things themselves: it expresses the real relationship between things.
Duhem will add that one cannot consider the physicist's experience as a copy of reality. Every physical experiment consists of measurements, and measurements presuppose many conventions and theories...
Duhem will never take away this truthfulness from physical theorems: they represent a description of the real. Moreover, a physical theory not only provides an accurate description of the real, but also an ordered description, for it always aims at a natural classification of physical phenomena—a natural classification, that is, one that reproduces the order of nature. No dogmatist, whether Descartes, Newton, or Hegel, ever demanded more...
However, if Duhem does believe in the necessity of metaphysics alongside science, why does he necessarily adhere to Thomistic metaphysics? Because it seems to him that it better agrees with the conclusions of physics...
Ostwald's "scientism" is very close to the position of the great Viennese mechanic Mach, who on this basis even refuses the title of philosopher.
Sensation is absolute. Through our sensations, we come to know reality. But science is the analysis of our sensations. To analyze sensations means to discover the exact relationships between them, to discover
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the order of nature, using this term in its most objective sense, for the order of nature is nothing other than the order of our sensations...
In critical articles written against Mach by rationalists, Mach was sometimes accused of a tendency toward pragmatism. He was accused of skeptical relativism.
Sensation is, obviously, something human. Nevertheless, it is absolute, and human truth is absolute truth, because for humans it is complete and the only truth, a necessary truth.
[147] We can assume the existence of microbes, even if they are invisible until some reagent reveals them. Why, then, do we not have the right to assume some structure of matter that experience will someday reveal?
§ 6. MATTER FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF CONTEMPORARY
PHYSICS: A GENERAL OVERVIEW
[148-150] What, then, is the meaning of the campaign initiated by Brunetière and continued by religiously inclined minds, sincere indeed, but wishing to destroy everything that could be a stumbling block for them—what is the meaning of this campaign, which, if not leading to pragmatism, at least leads to a certain kind of pragmatism?...
Just as in mathematics we designate by terms such as order, number, and space certain groups of relationships on which our sensations depend, and just as the mathematical sciences have these relationships as their subject, so we further designate by the very general term "matter" a vast number of other, much more complex relationships, on which our sensations also depend. Physics studies these relationships. This is all we mean when we say that physics is the science of matter...
[152] It might seem natural to many that the objects of physics are elements that can be encompassed by these relationships, giving them real content and, so to speak, filling them out.
This was Spencer's idea in his classification of the sciences. However, this idea cannot be considered successful. The elements of reality are directly and immediately confirmed by us as something that must be.
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REMARKS ON A. RÉY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
Their existence does not require justification. One cannot ask whether they could be other than they are. To assert this would be to resurrect the old metaphysical idol of the thing-in-itself, i.e., in essence, idle verbalism in one form or another. Experience must simply be accepted. It justifies itself, for to the positive mind, it is, in the scientific sphere, the justification of every assertion.
[154-155] Does this mean that the agnostic critique of science is, after all, justified? And that there is some thing-in-itself inaccessible to science? and so on, and so forth. Once again, we are faced with metaphysics and its inevitable play on words! Let us try to clarify this question as clearly as possible.
If relative means that which deals with relations, then physics is relative. But if relative means that which is unable to penetrate to the essence of things, then physics, as we understand it, is not relative but absolute, because the essence of things, to which analysis inevitably leads in explaining them, consists of relations or, more precisely, a system of relations, from which our sensations depend. Sensations, the given, are stamped with subjectivity: these fleeting flashes are what the system of relations makes them, a system that will probably never recur in exactly the same form and which determines my state and the state of the environment at the moment in question. But here the scientist comes and extracts the universal that is part of this individual moment, the laws of which it is a complex expression, the relations that made it what it is.
All scientific laws essentially tell us why and how the given is as it is, what conditions and creates it, because they analyze the relations on which it depends. And they will reveal to us the absolute human truth when this analysis is complete, if it can ever be so.
§ 7. THE CONCRETE DATA OF MODERN PHYSICS
[156-161] All the relations on which transformations, degradation, dissipation, or dispersion of energy depend are grouped in a general physical theory called energetics.
NB
The essence of
Réy's agnosticism
NB
ha-ha!

This theory tells us nothing about the nature of the energies under consideration, and thus about the nature of physical and chemical phenomena. It merely describes what, how, and in what direction a physical or chemical change in the state of a given body occurs.
Energetic physicists claim that it is impossible to go further, that energetics provides us with a complete, necessary, and sufficient explanation of material phenomena, i.e., the totality of all the relations on which they depend. To give greater objectivity to their view, some even elevate energy to a kind of substance, which is supposedly the true material substance, the real acting cause of all our sensations, the model according to which we should form our conception of nature.
Energy here replaces the particles of atomic theories. It plays the same role and has the same kind of being: it is the basis of things, their ultimate nature, the absolute...
Mechanists, on the contrary, assert that it is possible to go further. Energetics, in their opinion, remains, as it were, on the surface of things, and its laws must either be reduced to other, deeper laws, or at least be supplemented by them, presupposing them as their foundation.
The mechanistic school includes, as already mentioned, the vast majority of physicists, especially experimental physicists, to whom physics owes its latest successes.
Supporters of this school first of all criticize the concept of energy and show that it cannot be elevated, as some do, to some kind of physical or metaphysical essence.
NB.
Further*, than materialistically interpreted (p. 157)
energetics! 216
NB
a joker this "positivist"
Mechanists versus energetics.

* - Further. Ed.

REMARKS ON A. RÉY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"

The energy of any system means only the ability of that system to perform work: it is potential when the work performed cannot be detected, and it is actual, or kinetic, in the opposite case. Therefore, the concept of energy is relative to the concept of work, which is a mechanical concept. Thus, energy cannot, obviously, be obtained in experience without recourse to mechanics and motion. But should not, in this case, energetics, if it wants to provide a comprehensible explanation of physico-chemical phenomena, be combined with mechanics, presented in a continuous connection with it, and, consequently, be integrated with the consideration of mechanical concepts?...
Mechanics, physics, and chemistry, from this point of view, form an extensive theoretical system, and mechanics constitutes the fundamental basis of this system, as motion is the ultimate essence of physico-chemical phenomena.
Contemporary mechanists, of course, no longer assert that current mechanics, as well as the laws governing the transformations of energy, have reached their final form, that science has found its immutable foundations. Having come into contact with the energetic critique—this success of modern science is undoubtedly due to it—they have abandoned the narrow dogmatism of the old mechanistic and atomistic views. They believe that new discoveries must expand the scientific horizon and constantly change the conception of the external world. Have we not, over the last fifty years, witnessed a reconstruction, almost a subversion, of classical mechanics? The old frameworks were first broken by the principle of the conservation of energy (Helmholtz) and Carnot's principle.
The phenomena of radioactivity, allowing us to penetrate deeper into the nature of the atom, led to the idea of the possibility of the electrical structure of matter and the necessity of supplementing the principles of classical mechanics with the principles of electromagnetism.
Indeed, the mechanistic view now strives to take the form designated as the electron theory. Electrons are the ultimate elements of all physical reality. These simple electric charges, or modifications of ether symmetrically distributed around one point, perfectly represent, by virtue of the laws of the electromagnetic field, inertia, i.e., the fundamental property of matter. Matter, thus, is nothing but a system of electrons. Depending on the nature of the modifications of ether (modifications still unknown), electrons can be positive or negative; a material atom is composed of both in equal quantities, or at least possesses equal positive and negative charges, with the positive charge apparently located at the center of the system. Negative electrons, or perhaps only some of them, move around the others like planets around the sun. Molecular and atomic forces, thus, are merely manifestations of the movement of electrons, as are the various forms of energy (light, electricity, heat).
From this follows a remarkable conclusion: the concept of the conservation of mass (or quantity of matter), which, along with the concept of inertia, formed the basis of mechanics, apparently cannot be retained in electromagnetic mechanics: in the latter, ponderable mass remains constant only at average speeds less than one-tenth the speed of light; but, being a function of velocity, it increases with it, the faster as we approach the speed of light. This hypothesis presupposes either the existence of opposite electric charges and ether, or only ether, a simple modification of which is the electron.
Finally, the works of Dr. Le Bon* and some English physicists allow us, apparently, to conclude that neither the quantity of matter nor even the quantity of energy remain constant. Both are only relations, depending on the state of the ether and its motion**.
[163-171] In our time, nothing remains and should not remain of this conception. We have come to a diametrically opposite view. All physicists are ready to revise the fundamental principles of their science or limit their application, as soon as this becomes necessary due to the appearance of new experimental data...
NB

* Gustave Le Bon; L'Evolution de la Matiere. -L'Evolution des Forces. (Flammarion, editeur.)
** Apparently, there is a transformation of matter into energy and energy into matter. By matter, of course, we mean only ponderable matter, and by energy—only the ability to perform work, which can be detected...

REMARKS ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"

But does this mean that physicists thereby abandon the hope of reaching the fundamental principles and ever deeper elements, by which an ever more extensive part of the given can be explained and encompassed? Such a conclusion, although it is opposed to the error of the old mechanists, would be no less a dangerous mistake. The present spirit of physico-chemical sciences, the modern scientific spirit, is not such as to retreat before the unknown.

Leading physicists, as we have seen, no longer fear to question the principles of the conservation of mass or ponderable matter.

Truth is not given ready-made; it is formed more and more each day. This is a conclusion that must be repeated tirelessly. Thanks to scientific work, our mind adapts itself more closely to its object and penetrates it more deeply every day. Assertions that seemed to us to be made as a result of the study of mathematical sciences appear here almost necessarily and at least very naturally. Scientific progress constantly establishes between things and us a correspondence that is both closer and deeper. We understand better and more...

The dispute between the energetists and the mechanists, often a very lively one, especially on the part of the energetists, is essentially only a moment in the progress of physico-chemical sciences, and a necessary one at that.

First of all, energetics warned against certain abuses of mechanical models, against the temptation to take these models for objective realities. Then it deepened thermodynamics and clearly showed the universal significance of its fundamental laws, which, instead of being limited to research concerning heat, have a legitimate and necessary application to the full scope of physico-chemical sciences. By expanding the significance of these laws, energetics powerfully contributed to the refinement of their formulation. Moreover: if from the point of view of discoveries, energetics has shown itself to be less fruitful than mechanicism, it still appears as a remarkable tool for exposition—sober, elegant, and logical. Finally, and this is particularly noticeable among chemists like Van't Hoff, Van der Waals, and Nernst, but is also increasingly found among physicists, both theories are willingly accepted, with the one chosen that best lends itself to investigation. They are used together; starting from the general equations of mechanics, or from the general equations of thermodynamics, depending on whether the path taken seems simpler or more advantageous. The fact is that physical theories are essentially hypotheses, tools for research and exposition, or organization. They are forms, frameworks, that must be filled with the results of experience. Only these latter constitute the true, actual content of the physical sciences.

It is on them that all physicists converge, and their constantly increasing number, more harmonious and more consistent, certainly characterizes the progress of physics, its unity, and its durability. They are the touchstone of theories and hypotheses that served to discover them and that strive to organize them without affecting their actual affinity, reproducing as accurately as possible the order of nature. And yet, although these theories are always hypothetical and, consequently, always lose something—and sometimes much—as experience brings us new discoveries, they never die completely. They merge, transforming into new, more comprehensive, and more adequate theories.

"...We must consider it a remarkable result of kinetic theory that atomism has been transferred to the science of electricity... Through this wonderful expansion of its horizon, atomism has shed entirely new light on a series of physical and chemical processes..." *.

§ 8. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

If the unknown is infinite, it would nevertheless be incorrect in our time to call it unknowable, as was casually done a few years ago.

Repeated and irreparable fiascos of metaphysical attempts forced physics to constitute itself as a science by decisively excluding the problem of matter. From then on, it sought only the laws of particular phenomena. This was "physics without matter"...

In accordance with the history, invariably repeated by the human mind since it has striven to know things, science takes from the world of metaphysical chimeras a new subject of study. The nature of matter is no longer a metaphysical problem, because it becomes a problem of experimental and positive order. Indeed, this problem

NB
?

* W. Nernst. Revue générale des Sciences, 15 March 1908.

NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY" the issue is not yet scientifically resolved; there is still room for many surprises; but one thing seems to have been achieved: science, not metaphysics, will resolve it.
I think, however, and I have tried to show this elsewhere, that kinetic concepts will always be closely linked with the progress of physics, because they represent an exceptionally useful, if not necessary, tool for discoveries, and because they are better adapted to the conditions of our knowledge. This is why I see the future of physics in the continuation of mechanistic theories. And this is why I just said that the energetic theory will probably dissolve, like the ancient mechanism, into kinetism, which is more flexible and more rigorous from the standpoint of hypothesis admission...
CHAPTER IV
THE PROBLEM OF LIFE
§ 1. HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
[173-174] With the problem of life, we approach the fundamental disagreements that may divide philosophy and science. Up to now, the dispute has been, so to speak, primarily theoretical. Most philosophers worthy of the name admit that, practically, scientific results are valid for matter. If, from a speculative point of view, they could raise certain objections to their validity, they still acknowledge that everything happens as if the conclusions of science were, if not justified by right, at least factually applicable to material reality. This latter can, to some extent, be expressed in mathematical, mechanical, and physico-chemical terms...
[177] Bichat and the Montpellier school, firmly believing that the phenomena of life can only be conditioned by a special cause, attribute them to a vital force, distinct from both material forces and the soul: hence the name vitalism given to this theory...
§ 3. THE DEMARCATION LINE BETWEEN
MECHANISM AND NEO-VITALISM
[189-190] If we attempt to synthesize neo-vitalism according to its main representatives, whether scientists or philosophers, we seem to arrive at the following:
NB
NB

the criticism to which the neo-vitalists subject biological mechanism is closely intertwined with the criticism that pragmatist, anti-intellectual, or agnostic philosophy has subjected to mathematical and physico-chemical sciences. It seems to us that we change the problem when moving from matter to life. In essence, however, we stand, as hinted at the very beginning, before the same fundamental problem, and this problem is the same problem of the value of science insofar as it is knowledge. Only the specific terms in which it is posed essentially change.
Indeed, what did the new philosophy reproach the mathematical or physico-chemical sciences with? That they are arbitrary and utilitarian symbolism, created for the practical needs of our mind, our reason, which are abilities for action, but not for knowledge. Thus, when we transfer the physico-chemical method to biological facts, we, of course, also transfer the results it allows us to achieve, the implications it carries regarding the value of these results. Therefore, the physico-chemical mechanism will be an excellent formula, giving us a practical grasp of living things; it will be completely powerless to enlighten us about what life itself is. As the physico-chemical sciences in the domain of matter, the physico-chemical mechanism in the domain of life will allow us to act, and never to know...
[192-194] The neo-Thomists revive in matter a force, a striving, a desire, reanimating it with a pagan, albeit, breath of hylozoism, from which the Greeks, and especially Aristotle, never, it seems, could entirely part. However, they distort the Hellenic doctrine. For them, matter possesses no other activity except the force put into it by the creator: a reminder, so to speak, of its creation and an indelible sign of it, which it bears...
And even the nominalists, who are in a very close relationship with this neo-scholastic movement *, and the pragmatists, who often flirt with these philosophies of faith (too often, rather,
NB
NB

* The neo-scholastics, or neo-Thomists, particularly strive to rehabilitate scholastic interpretations of Aristotelianism, thus - the philosophical doctrines of St. Thomas. - Nominalists emphasize the symbolic, artificial, and abstract character of science, the vast chasm between reality and its formulas. - Pragmatists have a similar doctrine, but based on a more general metaphysics. All knowledge is directed toward action; therefore

NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"

Those who, in the name of a philosophy (which one has to call the philosophies of believers), considered themselves entitled to say that the content of their subject is not exhausted by the sciences of matter. To truly know, one must "go further"...
For the vitalist, life plays the role of a creative force; but precisely because it also depends on material conditions, it is by no means a creation out of nothing. As a result of its action, it will certainly produce something new and unforeseen, but to achieve this, it will act upon preceding elements, which it will combine, and especially starting with pre-existing elements, to which it will add its own. The mutations observed by the botanist de Vries (who, being a mechanist, explains them differently) would here even be a manifestation and proof of these creative additions.
§ 4. NEO-VITALISM AND MECHANISM DIFFER ONLY IN
PHILOSOPHICAL HYPOTHESES THAT SUPPLEMENT SCIENCE
[204] But in the vitalist method, entelechy and dominance have nothing in common with the metaphorical elements depicted: ends cannot be depicted because they do not exist materially—at least not yet, for they are in the process of coming into being, gradually realized.
§ 6. MECHANISM IS ALSO MERELY A HYPOTHESIS
[216-218] But it would be contrary to all the lessons of experience to assert that all life phenomena can be reduced to physico-chemical laws and that mechanism has been experimentally verified in its entirety. On the contrary, we know very little about life...
One might then wonder, what is the point of dealing with mechanistic theories? Should not these very general hypotheses, whose verification presupposes the complete completion of science, be expelled from science? Here we again encounter the opinion, as we have already seen, held by a number of physicists regarding physics and precisely
NB
it is revealed!
NB

truly, we only know what interests our mode of action. All these philosophies are agnostic in the sense that they deny us the possibility of achieving, with our intellectual capacities, an adequate and exact knowledge of reality...

regarding mechanistic theories in physics. Let us recall that some energists wanted to expel mechanistic hypotheses from physics as generalizations that cannot be verified, useless, and even dangerous. And among biologists, we find some scientists who take the same position and directly align with these energist physicists...
In biology, the energetic school is less clearly distinguished from the mechanistic school than in physics. It rather represents a *timid aspect* of mechanism, for it opposes teleology and postulates the correspondence of life phenomena to inorganic phenomena.
§ 7. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS; SUGGESTIONS FOR BIOLOGY
[223-224] Living matter clearly exhibits properties related to habit and heredity: everything happens as if it remembered all its previous states. Meanwhile, inanimate matter, it is said, never exhibits this property. It would even be contradictory to imagine such a thing. All material phenomena are reversible.
All biological phenomena are irreversible.
In these conclusions, it is forgotten that the second law of thermodynamics could be called the principle of evolution or heredity **...
[227] Science cannot decide to consider the various categories of facts, for which it has divided itself into distinct sciences, as forever isolated. This division has entirely subjective and anthropomorphic causes. It arises solely from the needs of research, which prompt arranging questions in series, focusing attention separately on each, starting with the particular to arrive at the general. Nature itself is a whole.
* - a *timid aspect* of mechanism. Ed.
** Clausius called this the principle of entropy, which exactly corresponds to the word evolution, but borrowed from Greek, not Latin.

* - a *timid aspect* of mechanism. Ed.
** Clausius called this the principle of entropy, which exactly corresponds to the word evolution, but borrowed from Greek, not Latin.

REMARKS ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
CHAPTER V
THE PROBLEM OF MIND
§ 2. ANCIENT EMPIRICISM AND ANCIENT ANTI-METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTS: PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL PARALLELISM
[242-246] Although metaphysical rationalism constitutes a great philosophical tradition, its ancient assertions could not but provoke critical objections from discerning minds. And in all times, we see philosophers attempting to resist rationalist and metaphysical currents. These are primarily sensationalists and materialists, then associationists and phenomenologists. In a general sense, they can be called empiricists.
Instead of opposing mind to nature, they attempt to place the mind back into nature. But they continue to understand the mind in the same simplistic and intellectualist manner as those they criticize...
Empirical theory conceived of the mind in a way similar to how atomism represents matter. This is a psychological atomism, in which atoms are replaced by states of consciousness: sensations, ideas, feelings, emotions, sensations of pleasure and pain, movements, volitional states, etc. ...
Thus, our psychological states are merely a collection of elementary consciousnesses, corresponding to the atoms that make up our nervous centers. Mind is parallel to matter. It expresses, in its own form and language, what matter expresses in its own form and language. Mind on one side, matter on the other, two mutually inverse translations of the same text.
For idealists, the original text is the mind; for materialists, it is matter; for spiritualist dualists, both texts are equally original, as nature is written simultaneously in both languages; for pure monists - we have to make two translations of the original text, which eludes us...
§ 3. MODERN CRITIQUE OF PARALLELISM
[248-249] When it is said that consciousness is unitary and continuous, one must beware of the idea that this revives the theory of the unity and identity of the "I," which was the cornerstone of ancient rationalism. Consciousness is unitary, but it never remains identical to itself, just as any living being. It constantly changes, not like a thing created once and for all and remaining the same, but like a being that is constantly being created: evolution is creative. The concept of identity and constancy would only be necessary if it were needed to impose a synthetic and unifying connection on the diverse states, seemingly revealed under these appearances. But if we assume that reality is essentially continuous and that the gaps found in it are artificial, the need to appeal to the principle of unity and constancy disappears.
The theories of Anglo-American pragmatism are extremely close to the above-described ones. These theories are very diverse, especially in their moral and logical applications, which have been derived from them. But what unites them and allows them to be grouped together is precisely the common features of the solution they provide to the problem of consciousness. William James, the great psychologist of pragmatism, gave this solution its clearest and most complete form. His conception simultaneously contradicts, and almost on the same grounds, both the conception of metaphysical rationalism and the conception of empiricism...
[251-252] William James asserts that he arrived at this theory only because he followed the rules of experience with the utmost rigor: and he calls it the "theory of radical empiricism," or "pure experience." For him, ancient empiricism remained imbued with metaphysical and rationalist illusions. He tried to completely free it from them.
These new theories of consciousness have undoubtedly gained considerable sympathy in a very short time: the Englishmen - Schiller, Peirce, the Americans - Dewey and Royce, in France and Germany - scholars like Poincaré, Hertz, Mach, Ostwald, and on the other hand, almost all those who want to renew Catholicism while remaining faithful to it, can be associated with the intellectual current, the most systematic exposition of which is given by Bergson and James. Undoubtedly, moreover, these sympathies seem largely deserved...
[254-255] We will see, in connection with the problem of knowledge and truth, that pragmatism indeed often led to skeptical conclusions, but these conclusions are far from being necessary. The
"Theory of
Experience" by
James
NB
James, Mach and others

NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
James, who at times seems to stand very close to skeptical irrationalism, once remarked that a strict interpretation of experience should not lead us to believe that experience gives us a concept only of isolated facts, but it also, and especially, gives us a concept of the relations existing between these facts...
Thus, the new orientation, which has manifested itself in philosophy and which has been called pragmatism, apparently marks an undisputed progress in scientific and philosophical conceptions of the mind.
§ 4. GENERAL CONCEPT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL ACTIVITY
[256-261] It would now be necessary to specify what the relations constituting the psychological world are, and how they differ from the relations that make up the rest of nature and experience. On this subject, the Viennese physicist Mach has perhaps given the clearest indications*. In every experience, what is given depends on a multitude of relations, which, first of all, can be divided into two groups: those that are identically verified by all organisms externally similar to ours, i.e., by all witnesses; and those that vary depending on the witness. Psychology takes as its subject all of the latter, and their totality constitutes what we call psychological activity. More precisely, the former do not depend on our organism and biological activity. The latter depend on them intimately and inevitably...
Mathematics, mechanics, physics, chemistry, biology—these are sciences, each of which isolates a group of relations from the totality of relations contained in the given, and which are independent and must be considered independently of our organization. These are objective relations, the subject of the science of nature, the ideal of which is to exclude from the given all relations that make it dependent on our organism...
Experience shows us the mutual influence of the biological and the psychological, the system of relations between them. Why not consider each of these two orders of facts as two orders of natural phenomena, which act and respond to one another, just like all other orders of natural phenomena: thermal, electrical, optical, chemical, etc.? There is no more or less difference between all these orders than there is between the biological and the psychological order. All phenomena should be viewed in the same plane and considered capable of conditioning one another.

* Annee psychologique 1906, XII-e annee. (Paris, Schleicher.)

Undoubtedly, this concept will be met with the objection that it does not explain why there is experience and knowledge of this experience by the organism. But does it not seem that one could and should reply that this question, like all metaphysical questions, is poorly posed and non-existent? It arises from an anthropomorphic illusion, always opposing the spirit to the universe. One cannot speak of why there is experience, for experience is a fact and imposes itself as such...
Experience, or, using a less ambiguous term, the given, has so far seemed to us dependent on mathematical, mechanical, physical, and other relations. When we analyze these conditions, it also appears to us as dependent on certain relations, which, in general, can be said to distort it, depending on the individual to whom it is given: these distortions constitute the subjective, the psychological. Can we establish—at least, still very roughly and from afar—the general meaning of these new relations, these distortions, i.e., the direction in which scientific analysis, progressing over centuries, dares to uncover the most general (principles) implied by them?
In other words, why is the given, instead of being identical for all individuals, and instead of being immediately given, forming only a single whole with the knowledge that is had about it, subjectively distorted? Distorted to such an extent that a considerable number of philosophers and common sense have come to break the unity of experience and to posit an insurmountable dualism of things and the spirit, which is nothing but the dualism of experience as it is for everyone, to the extent that the sciences correct it, and experience as it is distorted in individual consciousness...
[271-272] Images are not identical with sensations, as subjectivism asserted, if we give this word, ambiguous in the breadth of its meaning, the sense of immediate experiences. In this respect, Bergson's analysis was far from unfruitful. An image is the result of certain relations already contained in immediate experience, i.e., in sensation. But the latter contains many others. Let only the relations that constitute the system of the "image" (a partial system, if compared with the entire system of sensation and
"experience is a fact" experience of socially-organized
individuals

REMARKS ON A. RÉY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
Let us assume that we are given only those relations of the entire system which, for a given [entity], involve dependence on the organism; then we obtain precisely an image, a recollection.
By defining recollection in this way, we merely reflect the latest results of experimental psychology and, at the same time, the most ancient ideas of common sense: recollection is an organic habit. What recollection shares with primitive sensation are only the organic conditions. It lacks all the non-organic relations contained in sensation, with what we call the external environment.
This complete dependence of the image and this partial dependence of sensation on organic conditions also allow us to understand illusion, sensory deception, dreams, and hallucinations, when the relations with the external environment are to some extent abnormally interrupted, and for the individual, experience is reduced to what occurs within his organism, i.e., to relations dependent on the latter, and thus to the purely psychological, to the purely subjective...
§ 5. THE PROBLEM OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
[280] Our fully conscious life constitutes only a very limited part of the totality of our psychological activity. It is like the center of a light projection, around which lies a broader area of half-shadow, gradually merging into absolute darkness. Old psychology made a major mistake by considering as psychological activity only that which is fully conscious.
But if it is difficult to overestimate the volume occupied by the unconscious in our organization, it would also be wrong, as some pragmatic psychology often does, to overestimate the qualitative significance of this unconscious.
According to some pragmatists, clear consciousness, intellectual and rational consciousness, is the most superficial and the most insignificant part of our activity...
§ 6. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CONCEPT OF PURPOSEFULNESS
[285-286] For immediate and superficial observation, higher psychological life certainly seems entirely marked by purposefulness. Generalizing from the known to the unknown, we see that attempts have long been made to provide a teleological interpretation of all lower psychological life. The simplest reflex, such as blinking in bright light, the simplest physical pleasures and pains, primitive emotions—do not these facts seem prescribed by the interest in the preservation and progress of the species, or the preservation and progress of the individual? From the amoeba, this rudimentary lump of protoplasm, stretching towards certain light rays and trying to avoid others, does not all activity, which can be called conscious, always belong to the category of inclination, and is not inclination a form of purposefulness in action?
It is no wonder, then, that James, Tarde, and many others conclude from these facts that psychological laws have a completely different character from other natural laws. These are teleological laws...
The teleological concept of the psychological law is essentially nothing more than a scientific veneer placed over metaphysical concepts that make inclination, will to live, instinct, will, and action the basis of all existence. Moreover, it has been adopted, explained, and developed by pragmatists, advocates of the primacy of action. For them, functional psychology and finalistic psychology are synonymous terms...
§ 7. THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY
[294-296] The antithesis between unanalyzable activity, reality on the one hand, and relation on the other, fades away, and for both spirit and matter, it should be relegated to the category of obsolete metaphysical rubbish. All that is given is but a synthesis, the analysis of which is the task of science, reconstructing it in its conditions and, further, decomposing it into relations.
But in this case, what will become of the immortality of the spirit, especially its personal immortality, since, for two thousand years, this has been the most important thing for us? Not to follow the law of things, not to follow the law of all living beings, not to disappear, not to be annihilated in another! To be subjected to this beautiful risk, belatedly invented by a poor player, which man is, a poor player who wants to win the beauty and demands that the dice be loaded in his favor!
Undoubtedly, a system of relations can hardly seem eternal or immortal. However, there is nothing in this that would be absolutely impossible. Unlikely - yes! Impossible - no!
But it would be necessary, on the ground on which we stand here, for experience to destroy the unlikelihood or, at least, to transform it into likelihood.
NB
NB

REMARKS ON A. RÉY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
He would need to make us discover, behind the subjective conditions that would exist after the disappearance of the organism, relations that would make it partially dependent on something other than this organism. This must be decided by experience. Only it can remove doubts. A priori, there is nothing to prevent the discovery of certain conditions, certain relations, which would result in - at least partial - indestructibility of a part of the given, for example, consciousness.
But is it necessary to say this? Experience has never yet shown us anything like this. I am not unaware that spiritualists assert the opposite. But this is only an assertion. Their experiments - at least those not based on tricks and deception (and are not such in the minority?) - in the current state of affairs, can, at most, suggest the idea that there are some natural forces, some mechanical movements, whose manifestations we know very poorly, and whose conditions and laws we know even worse. It even seems likely that they depend on the human organism and relate simply to unconscious psychological and biological activity of the organism.
And in the face of the poverty of alleged experimental verifications of post-mortem life, the theory of the immortality of the soul can retain only the form that Socrates and Plato gave it: it is a risk one must take - it is an appeal to the unknown, and such an appeal, on which there is little chance of ever receiving an answer...
CHAPTER VI
THE PROBLEM OF MORALITY
§ 1. IRRATIONAL MORALITY:
MYSTICISM OR TRADITIONALISM
[301-306] The new philosophies, therefore, are first and foremost moral doctrines.
And it seems that these doctrines can be defined as: the mysticism of action. This is not a new position.
It was the position of the sophists, for whom there was neither truth nor error, but simply success. It was the position of the post-Aristotelian probabilists and skeptics, the position of some nominalists during the scholastic period, the position of the subjectivists of the 18th century, namely Berkeley.
immortality and Rey's agnosticism
NB
NB

The doctrines of intellectual anarchists, such as Stirner and Nietzsche, rest on the same premises.
Thus, in the apparatus of contemporary nominalism and pragmatism, words are newer than things...
When some modernists, like Leroy, find in pragmatism a justification for Catholicism, they perhaps do not see what some philosophers - the founders of pragmatism - wanted to draw from it. But they draw conclusions that can be legitimately made from it and, indeed, have been made, or almost made, by prominent pragmatists such as W. James and the philosophers of the Chicago school. I think I can even say more. I believe that Leroy makes the only legitimate conclusions that should be drawn from this way of thinking...
What characterizes pragmatism is that everything that succeeds and is somehow adapted to the moment is true: science, religion, morality, tradition, custom, routine. Everything must be taken seriously, and what achieves its purpose and allows for action must be taken seriously...
What has hitherto destroyed traditions and dogmas? Science, or, if one prefers the tool to the product, reason. Science lives by freedom; reason, in the end, is nothing but the freedom of discussion.
Moreover, science and reason are first and foremost revolutionary, and the Greco-Western civilization built on them has been, is, and will be a civilization of rebels. Rebellion has so far been our only means of liberation and the only form in which we could know freedom. I mean the spiritual rebellion of reason, mastering itself, not the crude rebellion, which was merely the shell - often useful, sometimes necessary - of the precious metal that is the former.
Thus, the main help that can be given to tradition, to the preservation of ancient moral values, using a fashionable term, is the devaluation of science. This is why pragmatism, nominalism, had to logically lead, as many of those who adhered to it very well saw, with a rational understanding of the matter, to the justification of certain motives for action: religious, sentimental, instinctive, traditional. In the same plane as the motives for action derived from scientific knowledge, or, more logically, on a higher plane, since science aims only at industrial action, the new philosophy had to lead to the legitimization of irrational morality: the impulse of the heart or submission to authority, mysticism or traditionalism.
Tradition-
NB

NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
Empiricism sometimes goes so far that some (William James, for example) do not hesitate to return in morality to the absolute rationalist theories of morality...
§ 4. SCIENCE OF MORALS
[314] ... For this concept of morality as a rational art to be possible, it is obviously necessary for a science of morals to be possible. Here, metaphysics once again takes wing with hope. Indeed, sociology, of which this science of morals is only a part, has barely come into being. It is still, like psychology but much less advanced, in a period when it must contest from the metaphysicians the method, the subject matter of the science, and its right to exist. However, it seems that here, as elsewhere, the question will ultimately be resolved in favor of scientific efforts. One cannot prevent the chatter of metaphysicians, but one can give freedom to words and actions. And thus, thanks to the work of Durkheim and his school, sociology has acted and operated...
CHAPTER VII
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH
§ 1. TRADITIONAL SOLUTIONS
[325-326] Scientists, pure scientists, actually pay little attention to the question of truth. They are content to arrive at assertions that gain universal agreement and, consequently, appear necessary. For them, any experience, methodically conducted and properly controlled, is true. The experimental test, they say, is the criterion of truth. And the scientists are entirely correct, for practice has always justified this position. To suppose that it will not always justify it would be to imagine something absurd, to doubt for the sake of doubting...
[328-332] Contemporary rationalists vigorously defended themselves against the attacks of pragmatism, when it asserted that the rationalists' reason ultimately resulted in providing our mind with a faithful copy of reality. Indeed, pragmatism accused rationalism of splitting knowledge into two synchronous parts: objects, or things-in-themselves, and the representations that the mind forms of them...
NB
NB

§ 2. CRITICISM OF PRAGMATISTS
... James asserts that whatever is verified by experience is true, and at other times, whatever ensures any success in our activity. If we accept this latter proposition, it almost necessarily follows that truth no longer exists. For what succeeds today may not succeed tomorrow: a case, not uncommon in practice, as changes in laws and rights, moral rules, and religious beliefs, and scientific opinions demonstrate. Today's truth is tomorrow's error; truth on this side of the Pyrenees is error on the other side. This is a banal topic. And these conclusions, which the founder of pragmatism, Peirce, firmly rejected and against which he struggled, and from which great pragmatic philosophy, especially James, tried to escape through the most subtle evasions—these are the conclusions generally accepted by the majority of epigones. Moreover, in connection with the problem of truth, pragmatism has become synonymous with skepticism, just as in matters of morality or faith, it has become synonymous with irrational traditionalism.
And yet, as in all criticism, there is, of course, a grain of truth in the criticism that pragmatism levels at rationalism. One can say about it what is often said about critical theories: the destructive part is excellent, but the constructive part leaves much to be desired. There is no doubt that the theory of the mind as a mirror of things and of truth as a copy is grossly superficial. The evolution of scientific truths, through all the errors that dot the path of science, proves this.
On the other hand, when we consider ourselves as an organism acting in the environment of the universe, it is true that we cannot separate the domain of practice from the domain of truth, for, as we have said before, and after all the lessons of science, we cannot separate truth from experimental verification. Only those concepts that are successful are true. But we must still determine whether they are true because they are successful, or whether they are successful because they are true. Pragmatism always tends to resolve the alternative in the first sense. Common sense, apparently, can resolve it only in the second...
§ 3. INDIRECT INDICATION OF THE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH
[333-334] All the knowledge that experience gives us is interconnected and systematized. But it is systematized not as in rationalism, by the force of an activity standing above it, which would impose its forms upon it. This concept, wishing
sic!
ha!

NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
The attempt to ensure the solidity of science, on the contrary, leads to skepticism, for it makes knowledge a matter of spirit, and this dualism inevitably raises the question of whether this creation of the spirit, knowledge, does not distort the given. Here, on the contrary, our knowledge is systematized in exactly the same way as it is given to us, and the relations of the given have the same value as the given itself. In reality, the immediate given and the relations contained within it form a unity and cannot be separated. All acts of cognition have the same nature and equal value...
§ 4. THE PROBLEM OF ERROR
[336-347] In absolute realism *, in which we have been moving so far, there seems to be no place for error. But let us recall that we identified experience and knowledge only at the starting point. It is now time to show what this limitation means.
The fact established by experience is that the cognitions of different individuals are not exactly the same. This can be explained in two ways: either there are as many different realities as there are individuals (which is absurd: we would fall into subjectivism), or, and to this alternative we are therefore compelled to adhere, since the given is unique and the same for all, the differences between the cognitions that individuals acquire about it arise from the conditions in which they were and are, in other words, from certain individual relations that exist between them and the given, and which scientific analysis can reveal. This is the conclusion to which other considerations led us in discussing the problem of consciousness. We saw that the given contained relations independent of the cognizing individual—objective relations—and relations by which the given depends on the cognizing organism—subjective relations.
Granting this, we see that in experience, and not at the starting point, but as we analyze it, a split occurs between the factor of cognition and the object of cognition. This relation, as we have said,
* - absolute realism. Ed.

has the same value as the given itself. It is imposed upon us with the same right as the given; hence, the distinction between mind and object should not be posited as something original, but as a product of analysis, as two very general relations that analysis discovers in the given (W. James); and this distinction derives its value from the value assigned to experience as a whole, taken as a single and indivisible entity...
Truth is the objective. The objective is the totality of relations independent of the observer. Practically, it is what is recognized by all, what constitutes the object of universal experience, universal agreement, understanding these words in a scientific sense.
By analyzing the conditions of this universal agreement, seeking the right claimed by this factor, the cause justifying it, we come to the following conclusion:
the aim of scientific work is to "de-subjectivize," to depersonalize experience, systematically extending and continuing it. Therefore, scientific experience continues crude experience.
And there is no difference in character between the scientific fact and the crude fact.
It has sometimes been said that scientific truth is only an abstraction. Of course, it is only an abstraction if one considers crude, i.e., subjective and individual, experience, for it excludes from this experience everything that depends solely on the individual who knows through experience. But this abstraction, on the contrary, aims to regain the given as it is, independent of the individuals and circumstances that alter it, to uncover the objective, primarily the concrete, the real.
It would be interesting to try to test this general theory by analyzing some famous errors. For example, the Ptolemaic system shows us an experience cluttered with individual conceptions, dependent on terrestrial conditions of astronomical observation: it is the stellar system as seen from the Earth. The Copernican-Galilean system is much more objective, as it eliminates the conditions dependent on the fact that the observer is placed on the Earth. In a broader sense, Poincaré made the observation that causality in mechanics, in the science of the Renaissance, and in the science of our time, encompassed
* - Rey's theory of knowledge = shy materialism
NB

NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY" conditions for the appearance of a phenomenon, independent of space and time. However, the point is that the conditions of position in space and time encompass, especially in mechanics, almost the entire aggregate of subjective conditions, which are already not so crude as to be excluded by simplified considerations.
An important conclusion: error is not an absolute antithesis to truth. As many philosophers have asserted, it does not have a positive character; rather, it is negative and partial, it is, in some sense, a lesser truth. By stripping it, through experience, of the subjective elements it implies, we gradually arrive at the truth. Truth, in the full sense of the word, once attained, represents the absolute and the limit, for it is objective, necessary, and universal. But this limit is far from us in almost all cases. It appears to us almost as a mathematical limit, to which we draw ever closer without ever being able to reach it. Moreover, the history of science shows us truth in the process of development; truth has not yet been fully formed, but it is forming. Perhaps it will never be fully formed, but it will continue to form more and more.
Finally, one more question can be posed—whether we are still possessed, instead of being content with what exists, by the same old metaphysical illusion, which consists in the desire to find out why things exist.
Why does experience have subjective conditions? Why is the knowledge of it not immediately unified and identical for everyone? We seem to have the right to refuse to answer; but here, thanks to psychology, it seems possible to give a positive indication. If complete experience had, to some extent, knowledge of itself, like the pantheistic god, this knowledge would indeed be immediately unified and identical. But in experience, as it presents itself to us, the knowledge of experience is given in fragments, and only for these fragments of experience do we become ourselves.
truth and error (approaching dialectical materialism)
?
verbal quibbling with “experience” “experience”

Biology and psychology teach us that we have evolved or, more accurately, are evolving into what we are through adaptation, continuous equilibrium with the environment. From this, we can generally conclude that our knowledge must, above all, respond to the needs of organic life. Furthermore, at first, it is limited, vague, and very subjective, as in instinctive life. But once consciousness appeared in the play of universal energies, it persists and intensifies due to its practical utility. More and more complex beings evolve and develop. Consciousness becomes more precise, more defined. It becomes mind and reason. And at the same time, adaptation to experience, conformity to it, becomes more complete. Science is merely the highest form of this process. It has the right to hope, even if it never achieves it, for knowledge that is already only one whole with the given, absolutely adequate to the object: objective, necessary, and universal. Theoretically, its claim is justified, for it lies in the direction of evolution that has occurred up to now. Practically, however, this claim will probably never be satisfied, for it marks the limit of evolution, and to reach it would require a state of the universe completely different from the current state, and a kind of identification between the universe and the experience of cognition...
The most artificial of all abstractions is the one that excludes from experience the results of rational labor and the achievements of evolution.
This evolution was definitely directed by practice and for practice, for it is transmitted and realized through the continuous adaptation of the being to its environment. Who would deny this today? This is, after all, one of the most decisive victories of pragmatism over the now fossilized rationalism. But it does not mean that the true is determined by the function of utility and success.
On the contrary, it means that the useful, the success, are the result of possessing the truth...
l'expérience = le milieu?*

* - experience = environment? Ed.

NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
To express the relationship between practice and truth clearly and precisely, it would perhaps be better to say not: what succeeds is true, but what is true succeeds, i.e., what is in accordance with reality, insofar as it concerns an attempt at action. Direct action is the result of accurate knowledge of the realities in the environment in which it takes place. We act correctly in proportion to our actual knowledge.
§ 5. THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
Everyone, I believe, would agree that what we assert as true and objective is that which does not depend on the individual coefficient present in each individual's act of knowing. But where discrepancies are found, it will be necessary to determine at what point the individual coefficient disappears. Can I, in the face of any experimental assertion, make a distinction between what is universally confirmed and what is confirmed only by me?
In general, we have said that science, in all cases, has sought to make this distinction. Essentially, science has no other goal. It could define itself by this characteristic. Practically, we already have the first way to distinguish what is true and objective from what is subjective and illusory. What is true will be what is obtained through the strict application of scientific methods. Scientists are tasked with developing, refining, and defining these methods. This first criterion is stricter than the too vague rule we have given so far: universal agreement. For universal agreement may be nothing more than a universal prejudice...
We must agree: the truth that man can attain is human truth. By this term, we do not mean to say that it is relative in the skeptical sense of the word. But we do mean to say that it depends on the structure of the human species and is valid only for this species...
confuses relative in the skeptical sense!!!

However, it is necessary to put an end once and for all to certain sophisms: truth, which is valid for the entire human race, human truth, for man is absolute truth, for if we assume, as do the proponents of a non-human absolute, that it is not a reflection of reality, it is, at least for man, still the only possible precise translation, the absolute equivalent of it...
[351-352] A contemporary scientist, Poincaré, asserted... that physics never deals with identical facts, but simply with facts that are very similar to one another. In such a case, what use is science, for if it wants to be strictly accurate, each new fact would require a new law?
This objection is of the same nature as the following: every fact encompasses the infinite.
Therefore, we would need a complete science to have the slightest exact knowledge about the smallest subject. It is resolved in the same way and almost by itself...
In conclusion - the given is a scientific object because it is amenable to analysis, and this analysis reveals to us the conditions of its existence. Science is reliable because every analysis it produces gradually leads us to experimental intuitions, which have the same value as the given; thus, science has the same degree of certainty as the existence of the universe it explains and my own existence, also known to me through experimental intuition.
CHAPTER VIII
GENERAL CONCLUSION: THE PHILOSOPHY OF EXPERIENCE
[354-357] We constantly, from the very beginning of Greek philosophical thought, find the same two or three general orientations of the metaphysical spirit. These are the orientations by which all textbooks usually still classify philosophical systems under the names of materialism, spiritualism, and idealism.
In essence - if we consider things from a very general point of view, which we take here,
ha!
the finale = shy materialism

NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY" that is, from the point of view of a "special scale of values" that each of these orientations gives us - since spiritualism and idealism often present the closest analogies, it can be said that metaphysics always places us before two major scales of values: the materialistic scale and the idealistic-spiritualistic scale. These two scales are mutually opposite, and each is almost a reversed image of the other.
In the idealistic-spiritualistic scale, at the top of the ladder is the spirit; it gives meaning and value to everything else, either together with idealism representing the only reality, since material appearances are created by it or exist only for it, or together with spiritualism presenting, beyond material reality, which constitutes only its support or its environment, a higher reality in which nature is completed and by which it is explained. - In the materialistic scale, on the contrary, everything originates from matter and returns to it. It is the eternal and unchanging creator of all the spectacles of the universe, including the spectacle of life and the spectacle of consciousness. Life is merely a particular - among an infinite multitude of others - kind of combination that blind chance extracts from primary matter. Consciousness, thought, are merely phenomena of life; the brain secretes them as the liver secretes bile...
Thought, or at the very least, something of the order of a non-material and free spirit, is necessary both as the highest principle of explanation and as the essential principle of being and creation. Place the spirit, and everything in nature becomes understandable. Destroy it, and nature becomes incomprehensible. It evaporates into nothing.
Materialism, on the contrary, asserts - if I may be allowed to apply the same simplified method - that every experience explaining a psychological fact reduces it to organic facts. Organic matter is gradually reduced to inorganic matter. Force is nothing but an impulse to push; it is a movement combined with another. Therefore, at the basis of things, we find only crude and blind movement.
And so, for nearly three thousand years, these value systems have been taken up in each generation, developed, sometimes refined, very often obscured by the machinations of thought, which does not want to admit defeat. And we have advanced almost as little as at the very beginning.
Does this not mean, then, that the questions debated by these contradictory systems are idle and poorly posed? Is the desire to establish an explanatory hierarchy between things not a completely anthropomorphic prejudice? And does this prejudice not belong much more to the aspirations of individual feeling than to rational discussion? In essence, these systems are set up and opposed to one another for purposes very different from objective knowledge, and concern for them has nothing to do with impartial pursuit of the truth. Since they have no relation to positive discussion, let us not dwell any longer on their examination.
Either I am greatly mistaken, or contemporary philosophy in its living and powerful currents, which are positivism and pragmatism, tends toward this conclusion *...
[358-362] If by philosophy we mean those speculations that, on one side or the other of experience, seek the beginning, end, and nature of things, useless foundations of science or action, burdening what is directly known with the unknowable, which should justify it, if, in a word, we mean the old dialectics, whether rationalist or skeptical,
ha!!
W. James
on
pragmatism

* W. James, in defining pragmatism, insists on the idea that it is a system that turns away from a priori explanations, from dialectics and metaphysics, to constantly turn to facts and experience.

NOTES ON A. REY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"

Idealistic or materialistic, individualistic or pantheistic, these scholars seem to have triumphed. For all these metaphysicians, there is only an aesthetic interest, which, however, can be captivating for those who are partial to them: these are the individual dreams of elevated and not very practical minds...

Science is composed simultaneously of a collection of certain experimental results and of theories that, as a whole, are always to some extent hypotheses. But these hypotheses are necessary for science, for, anticipating future experience and the unknown, it is to them that we owe the successes of science. They systematize all that is known in such a way as to shed light on the unknown. Why should philosophy not be, in the same manner, a general synthesis of all scientific knowledge, an effort to imagine the unknown as a function of the known, in order to aid its discovery and support the scientific spirit in its true orientation? It would differ from science only by the greater generality of the hypothesis; a philosophical theory, instead of being a theory of a group of isolated and well-delineated facts, would be a theory of the totality of facts presented to us by nature, a system of nature, as they said in the 18th century, or at least a direct contribution to a theory of this kind.

The philosophical point of view is not opposed to the scientific point of view; it is compared with it. Even when the scientist makes every effort to achieve positivism, he is a philosopher, for positivism itself is a philosophy...

Science should not differ from philosophy either in subject (it is the same: to give an account of experience) or in method (it should be the same, for scientific discipline, by its very definition, is the only discipline that could satisfy our reason). No, the difference between them lies only in points of view, and what distinguishes, and should distinguish, the scientific point of view from the philosophical one is that the latter is much more general and always somewhat appears as an adventure. ...

[364-369] History shows us that when science becomes too detached from the most general human concerns, which constitute the essence
blagueur!* fool!
bim, bam!
phew!

* - blagueur (French) - braggart, liar. Ed.

of the majority of philosophical problems, and when it leaves the burden of answering these concerns to other speculations or traditional beliefs, either out of necessity or excessive prudence, it languishes or declines. Therefore, and indeed, it is absolutely necessary that the achievements of science and the scientific spirit be protected, if need be, even against themselves, from excessive self-assurance or from adventurism when they overstep their bounds. For excessive boldness—such as is shown, for example, by some materialistic generalizations—is no less dangerous to science for sound and straightforward minds than the timidity and cautious mind of the common people. Thus, one of the essential tasks of philosophy is to maintain the general atmosphere necessary for the development of science, for the normal maintenance and dissemination of the scientific spirit...

But, of course, philosophy can fulfill the dual mission to which it seems called: to coordinate the efforts of scientists and to serve as inspiring hypotheses for discoveries on the one hand, and on the other, to create the atmosphere necessary for the progress of science—only if it strives to be merely an organizing synthesis of the sciences, considered and understood as the scientists see and understand them, in short, a synthesis made exclusively in the scientific spirit.

It is, however, gratifying to see, to a lesser extent, of course, in pragmatism, but still to a considerable degree, that current philosophical research, decisively breaking with the metaphysical wanderings of the preceding period, is very conscientiously informed about scientific work, tries to conform to it, and draws its inspiration from it.

There is no doubt that in our time a very lively and very clear scientific sense is developing, which, for some, evolves parallel to religious or moral feelings and in a different plane where conflict is impossible, and which, for others, replaces this religious feeling and fully satisfies their needs. As Renan put it so beautifully, science has provided a symbol and a law. They have taken up a truly positive position, retaining from the old rationalism its unshakable faith in the human mind, while also embracing
protection from materialism

REMARKS ON A. RÉY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
The undisputed triumph of the experimental method has as its indisputable result that reason is but a continuous effort of the spirit to adapt itself to experience and to know it more deeply, a mutual penetration of objective reality and subjective thought.
It seems to me that the future of philosophy lies on this side, for on this side lies the truth. As with all prophecies, there is here only an act of faith. Whether it will be justified, the future will tell. And since it is an act of faith, I consider all other acts of faith legitimate, provided those who perform them do the same towards me. I even consider it a blessing that one current of ideas faces a stream of opposing ideas; it is refined, developed, corrected, and clarified through the criticism of opponents.
The philosophical position sketched in these brief outlines could be called rationalistic positivism, absolute positivism, or scientism. To avoid any ambiguity, it might be better to call it experimentalism, which would indicate both that it rests entirely on experience—but, in contrast to the old empiricism, on controlled experience, the fruit of scientific experimentation—and that it refuses, in its absolute realism and its experimental monism, to go beyond experience.
Experience is, first and foremost, and immediately, the totality of our sensations, what we call phenomena. But it begins to analyze itself as soon as attention and reflection are brought to bear, for this totality of sensations is but a crude and very superficial view of the given. Almost immediately, certain relations contained within it and constituting its true essence are recognized.
Science strives to gradually carry out this analysis, penetrating ever deeper into the nature of the given.
experience =
Σ * sensations
!!
positivism, experimentalism, realism
= "absolute positivism or rationalistic"

* - sum. Ed.

If one wishes to represent the immediately given as a point, then to obtain an image of the real given, one must imagine that this point is merely the projection of a line continuing beyond it. This line can be divided into several segments, each encompassing, in the absence of impermeable barriers, families of relations upon which the immediate given depends. Each of these families will be formed by definition, based on natural affinities that unite these relations. These will be relations of number and position, mechanical, physical, etc., and finally, psychological relations, defined by their dependence on the organism to which the given pertains. The number of such groups of relations corresponds to the number of special sciences.
Philosophy, on the other hand, tries to envision the line in its entirety and continuity. But the line in its totality, like the point through which it projects itself, the immediate given, and the relations that complement it as the analysis proceeds, all have the same character.
These are data of experience. And their totality constitutes the same experience: human experience.
It is our psychological constitution, not the nature of things, that distinguishes the world from perception, the universe from science; and this distinction is temporary and accidental.
Therefore, experience needs only to be explained. To explain it means simply to set forth the relations it contains, which it brings to our knowledge if we are able to perceive its lessons. Science begins to deal with them. But, being all of reality, experience does not need justification: it exists.
End.
"thing in itself"? *

* - "thing in itself"? Ed.

REMARKS ON A. RÉY'S BOOK "CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY"
CONTENTS
. *. *. *. *.
- § 6. Ideas of the mathematician Poincaré.
Poincaré
.
. *. *. *. *.
Pages 6-7; 28-29 = two lines
33 = truth = ? for pragmatism and 35
49 = objective value of science = center
Mathematics and pragmatism - 62
80: pragmatists dragged Poincaré to themselves; and Mach 90
Réy = pure agnostic 94 (93)
98: Mach + objectivity = Réy?!
100: Concepts = copies of reality
Objectivity 105
113: vulgar materialism*
Notes written in 1909.
First published in 1933 in the book "Philosophical Notebooks."
Printed from the original

* Written by V. I. Lenin in the margin of the publisher's announcement attached to A. Réy's book. Ed.