Chapter XIX (part 2)

A little more, and in every separate branch of science that which it does not know will become greater than that which it knows . In every department science itself is beginning to repudiate its p. 234 own foundations. A little more, and science in its entirety will ask, "Where am I?" Positive thinking—which conceived of its problem as the deducing of general conclusions from the findings of each separate science and all of them combined—will feel itself compelled to deduce conclusions from that which science does not know. Then all the world will see before it the colossus with feet of clay, or rather without any feet at all, but with a formidable misty body, hanging in the air. For a long time philosophy has realized the lack of feet of this colossus, but the majority of cultivated mankind is still hypnotized by positivism, which sees something in place of those feet. How-ever, it will be necessary to part company with this illusion very soon. Mathematics, lying at the very foundation of positive knowledge, and to which exact science always pointed with pride, as to its subject and vassal, is in reality now denying all positivism. Mathematics was included in the cycle of positive sciences only by mistake, and soon indeed mathematics will become the principal weapon AGAINST POSITIVISM. By positivism I mean, in this connection, that system which affirms, in contradiction to Kant, that the study of phenomena can bring us nearer to things in themselves, i.e., which affirms that by going along the path of the study of phenomena we can come to an understanding of causes, and—this is important—which regards physico-mechanical phenomena as the cause of biological and psychic phenomena. The usual positivistic view denies the existence of the hidden side of life , i.e., it finds that the hidden side consists of electro-magnetic phenomena and opens to us only little by little—and that the progress of science consists in the gradual unveiling of the hidden. "This is not known as yet," says the positivist, when his attention is called to something 'hidden,' " but it will be known . Science, going by the same path that it has gone up to now, will discover this also. Five hundred years ago, Europe did not know of the existence of America; seventy years ago we did not know of the existence of bacteria; twenty-five years ago we did not know of the existence of radium. But America, bacteria and radium are all discovered now. Similarly and by the same methods, and by such methods only, will be discovered everything that is to be discovered. p. 235 [paragraph continues] The apparatuses are being perfected, the methods, processes and observations are being refined. That which we did not even suspect a hundred years ago, has now become a generally known and generally understood fact. Everything that is possible to be known will become known after this manner." Thus do the adherents of the positivistic viewpoints speak, but at the foundation of these reasonings lies a deep delusion. The affirmation of positivism would be quite true did positivism move uniformly in all directions of the unknown; if sealed doors did not exist for it; if in the multitude of questions the principal questions did not remain just as obscure as in those times when science did not exist at all. We see that enormous regions are closed utterly to science, that it never penetrated into them, and worst of all it made not a single step in the direction of these regions. There are multitudes of problems the solving of which science has not even attempted ; problems in the presence of which the contemporary scientist, armed with all his science, is as helpless as a savage or a four-year-old child. Such are the problems of life and death, the problems of space and time, the mystery of consciousness, etc., etc.