or philosophy a priori; it does not fasten the mind in the strait jacket of mathematical-physical method, it does not compel us to reduce biology, psychology, and history to physics, it does not force us to reduce everything to static absolutes and block-universes. It leaves ample room for adventure and change; it takes experience as it comes and finds rhyme and reason in it. Even if nature and her laws were conceived as constantly changing, rationalism would not give up the ghost so long as there remained the possibility of discovering a law of change in the changing laws. Only in case there were no law of change, if nature were utterly lawless, would rationalism fail. But in that case, all the other philosophies,—pragmatism, intuitionism, and the rest,—would go down with the wreck, for every one of them is an attempt to understand experience, and none of them could thrive in an irrational world. And in such a world as that nothing would work.
The fundamental postulate of rationalism is that experience is somehow intelligible, that all genuine problems are somehow and sometime soluble; if reason can ask them intelligibly, reason can answer. But the demand for rationality does not necessarily preclude the possibility of freedom, responsibility, change, novelty, evolution, and play into the hands of absolute determinism. It is true, if reality is broken up into a physical series of causes and effects or into a mental series of the same character, then the concrete particular, thing or person, is caught in the clutches of circumstance, be they mechanical or teleological. Whether he is coerced by the physical machinery or by a universal purpose, man is equally a slave. But why should we interpret our categories of cause, purpose, and evolution in such a wooden way and insist on seeing everything, life and consciousness included, in the form of static absolutes? To conceive them so is to take a decidedly narrow and unhistorical view of reason and intelligence and to give an easy victory to mechanism. The way of escape from the block-universe is not through Romanticism but through a broad-minded rationalistic philosophy.
| Frank Thilly |
| Cornell University. |
